Free · No account · Works offline
Will you be
home for it?
Homeward is a calendar built around your swing, not the week. Put your roster in once and it tells you which birthdays, weddings, long weekends and school holidays you'll actually be back for.
Nothing to sign up for. Add it to your home screen and it works down the hole, on the bus, and anywhere else with no signal.
Home from 23–29 Sept — 7 days off.
Dad's birthday 28 Sept · in 11 days Home
The problem
Your calendar thinks
in weeks. You don't.
Every calendar ever made assumes Saturday and Sunday belong to you. Yours comes round every 14, 21 or 28 days and lands wherever it lands — so the one question that actually matters takes a pen, a paper roster and a bit of counting on your fingers.
Weekends shaded, like they're yours.
One unbroken run. It doesn't stop at Sunday.
Drag it sideways
Setting it up
Thirty seconds, once.
No account, no wizard, no six screens of questions. Pick the shape of your roster, say when the current swing started, and you're done — for good.
Pick your pattern
Common rosters are one tap away. If yours isn't one of them, build it block by block — any number of blocks, any lengths, days and nights in any order.
Say when this swing started
One date. That's what anchors the whole thing, so every day forwards and backwards falls out of it.
Add your travel days
Fly-in and fly-home get treated properly — landing in the morning and working that same day, or losing the day to the trip home after nights. Sleep first and fly out after lunch, or go straight from your last night to the airport: it asks, because those two cost you different amounts.
That's the setup finished
From here it just answers questions. Change it whenever your roster changes.
Drag it sideways
What it answers
The questions you
ask every swing.
Am I home on the 14th?
Type any date, get a straight answer — including whether it's a travel day rather than a real day off.
Which weekends am I home this year?
The whole year at once, so you can book something more than a fortnight out without ringing anyone.
Will I miss her birthday again?
Put the dates that matter in once. Homeward tells you which ones you're around for, years ahead.
When am I next off at the same time as him?
Send a mate your roster as a link and Homeward finds the days you're both free.
Make it yours
Seven looks. Your photo
behind the lot.
You'll open this thing at 4am in a dark donga and at midday in full sun, so it comes with seven looks, five roster palettes and room for a picture of wherever you'd rather be.
Try them on this page Changes everything you're looking at, so you can see what you'd get.
This only changes the page on your own device — nothing is sent anywhere and nobody else sees it. Reload and you're back to normal.
Put a picture behind it — the kids, the boat, the beach you're counting sleeps to get back to. Fade it until the words are easy to read.
Home from 23–29 Sept — 7 days off.
Dad's birthday 28 Sept · in 11 days Home
When real life happens
Rosters don't stay
the way you set them.
Staying back a few days
Tell it what happened and it asks the question that actually matters: does your next break get shorter, or does the whole roster push back? They give completely different answers.
What it'll cost you
Before you say yes to the extra shift, Homeward tells you what it breaks — that it'll put you on the plane the morning of Dad's sixtieth, say.
Push it to your calendar
Export the lot to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, so your roster sits alongside everything else in your life.
Send it to a mate
Your whole roster packs into a link. They open it, and the app works out the days you're both off — for planning a trip, or just a beer.
Leave, sick days, training
All handled as what they are, over the dates they apply to — not by hacking your pattern about and breaking everything after it.
Take a backup
One file, saved wherever you like, that puts everything back exactly as it was. Worth doing the day you set it up.
Your roster is nobody else's business
Nothing leaves
your phone.
There's no account, no login and no server keeping anything. Your roster lives on your own device. I can't see it, and neither can anyone else.
When you share your roster with someone, the pattern travels inside the link itself — it's never uploaded anywhere. Annual leave is only included if you tick the box, and sick days never are.
There are no ads, no trackers and no analytics in the app. Not as a promise — there's simply nowhere for anything to go. This page counts visits through Cloudflare: no cookies, nothing that identifies you. The app itself sends nothing, ever. The whole thing is open source if you'd rather check than take my word for it.
Getting it on your phone
Add it to your
home screen.
It's a website, so there's no app store and nothing to update. Add it once and it behaves like any other app — including with no signal.
iPhone
- Open app.homeward.day in Safari
- Tap the share button at the bottom
- Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen
Android
- Open app.homeward.day in Chrome
- Tap the three dots, top right
- Tap Install app or Add to home screen
On an iPhone this isn't optional if you want to keep your roster. Safari deletes a website's saved data after about a week of not opening it — which on a 7/7 happens constantly. Adding it to your home screen stops that. Then take a backup from Settings, and you're safe either way.
If something's not right
Sorting it out.
My roster disappeared
Almost always one of two things.
On an iPhone, if you didn't add it to your home screen. Safari clears a website's saved data after about a week without opening it. Adding Homeward to your home screen stops it — that version keeps your data properly.
You cleared your browsing data. That wipes it, same as it would any website.
Either way: take a backup from Settings once your roster is set up. It saves a file you can load straight back in.
My mate's link won't open properly
The whole roster is packed into the link rather than stored on a server, and it lives in the part after the #. Some apps and email clients trim that off when they turn a link into a preview.
Ask them to send it as a plain message rather than a link preview, and copy the whole thing including everything after the #. Without that part there's no roster in the link to read.
The dates are in the wrong order
Homeward follows your phone's region setting. If it's showing month first when you want day first, either change the region on your phone or set it yourself in Settings, under Dates look like.
The date picker itself is the one your phone provides, so that keeps your phone's format regardless.
My roster changed and now everything's out
Under Changes, add what happened over the dates it applies to. The one that catches people out is staying back extra days: you'll be asked whether your next break gets shorter, or whether your whole roster pushes back. They give completely different answers, so pick the one that matches what your supervisor actually told you.
If your roster pushed back, send anyone you've shared with a fresh link — the old one is now wrong.
Does it work with no signal?
Yes. Once it's on your home screen the whole app is stored on the phone. Everything it does — the roster, the dates, the weekends, the exports — is worked out on your device, so there's nothing to download and nothing to wait for.
My roster's a weird one. Will it fit?
Probably. You build the pattern out of blocks rather than picking from a list, so any number of blocks in any order works — 8/6, 14/7, 2/2/3, 5/2/4/3/9/5, four on four off, straight nights, an even-time swing that never lines up with a month.
If yours genuinely won't go in, tell me what it is and I'll make it fit. Every odd roster someone reports makes it work for more people.
What does it cost?
Nothing, and that's not a trial. There's no paid tier, no ads and nothing collected to sell. If it's saved you an argument about a birthday you're welcome to buy me a coffee — entirely optional, and it covers the domain.
Find out what you're
actually home for.
Set your roster once. It'll still be right in two years.
Open HomewardFree · no account · works offline