Elanorya

Drink Buddy

The refusal list is longer than the feature list, and that is the design

A drinks app with a statistics tab is one small step from a blood-alcohol calculator, and that step is the one that gets someone into a car. The boundary is not a tone-of-voice preference here — it is written as a set of things that are never computed, never displayed, and never wrapped in a disclaimer.

What it does count

Check-in counts for today, this week, this month and all time. A breakdown by generic drink. The share of your check-ins that were non-alcoholic. Alcohol-free days, if you opt in. Your current and longest streak. How you compare with friends across every drink type. How many different drinks you have tried.

That is the list. It is short because every entry had to survive the question of what someone could do with it that the product would not want to be responsible for.

What is never computed and never shown

Not hidden behind a setting, not gated behind a disclaimer, not present in the data model waiting for a screen.

  • Blood-alcohol concentration, sobriety timers, time-until-sober, or any impairment estimate
  • Standard drinks, units, grams of ethanol, alcohol-by-volume totals or millilitres of alcohol
  • Money spent on alcohol
  • Top-drinker, who-drank-the-most or champion framing, in any language
  • Speed metrics such as drinks per hour or session intensity
  • Any public or global comparison surface

Why every screen agrees

A smaller property than the refusals, and the one people notice when it is absent elsewhere.

One request per window feeds eight sub-screens.
Every figure is selected from the same response rather than fetched independently, so two screens cannot show different totals for the same period.
The surface is derived, never authored.
Nothing is entered into statistics and nothing is stored there. Correct a check-in and the figures follow; there is no second copy to fall out of step.
The numbers describe publishing, not consumption.
With five check-ins a day as the ceiling, a heavy evening is under-represented on purpose. Reading the tab as a consumption record is the one misreading the design invites.

Where the refusals came from

They are not a reaction to a complaint. They were written alongside the metrics, as a stated product principle that the app never celebrates volume, speed or competition in alcohol — described in the documentation as not negotiable for a launch date.

The same principle reaches further than this tab. The games layer carries a rule that no card, prompt or forfeit may instruct anyone to drink, and there is no tier that unlocks such a card. Streaks are satisfied by any drink, water included, precisely so that keeping one is not pressure to drink something.

Read together, these are one decision applied in three places rather than three separate policies that happen to agree.

What this page does not answer

Each has its own place, or deliberately none.

  • How the streak is defined and what keeps it alive.
  • Why the catalogue is category-generic in the first place, which is what makes hydration share meaningful.
  • Who can see your statistics. Friend comparison is bounded by the same friends-only model as everything else.
  • Which helplines appear on the responsible-drinking screen. They are local to the reader and not reproduced here.

Questions

Does the app estimate my blood alcohol level?

No, and it never will — not as a feature, not as entertainment, not behind a disclaimer. Estimating impairment from photographs of drinks is unreliable, and being wrong in the reassuring direction is the failure that matters.

Does it show units or standard drinks?

No. Units, standard drinks, grams of ethanol, alcohol-by-volume totals and millilitres of alcohol are all excluded, because publishing any of them turns a social app into a health instrument.

Is there a leaderboard?

There is a comparison with friends, and it ranks check-ins across every drink type rather than alcohol. There is no global or public ranking of any kind, and top-drinker framing is banned in every language.

Can I hide the alcohol figures entirely?

Yes. A toggle on the responsible-drinking screen removes alcohol-specific statistics, and the setting is stored on your account rather than on one device.