The device does nothing except notify you of calls that were considered and abandoned. Someone opens your contact, hovers, thinks better of it, closes the app. Your phone buzzes. That's the whole product.

The sensing part is the least interesting problem. Intent-before-action is already legible — dwell time on a contact card, a dialer field typed and cleared, the half-second where a thumb rests on the call button and then doesn't. Every phone already logs enough to reconstruct this. Nobody surfaces it because it seemed useless.

What I can't work out is what the notification should actually say.

If it names the person, you've created an obligation. You now know your sister almost called you at 11pm on a Tuesday and didn't, and you have to decide what to do with that. If it doesn't name them, it's just ambient noise — someone, somewhere, nearly reached out — which is either soothing or unbearable depending on the day.

The second-order thing worries me more. Once people know abandoned calls are transmitted, abandoning becomes a message. You'd get performative near-calls. Someone opens your contact for a deliberate eleven seconds so you'll feel the weight of their restraint. The channel gets colonised by intent almost immediately, and then it's just texting with extra steps and worse resolution.

Maybe that's fine. Maybe every communication medium is a near-miss detector that eventually hardens into a language.

But I keep coming back to the version where it's strictly one-way and strictly anonymous, and the only information transmitted is a count. Four people nearly called you today. No names, no times, no replying.

I genuinely don't know if that number is a comfort or a wound. It probably depends entirely on whether the number is ever zero.