A dog training app that watches what your dog actually does.
Ten minutes a day, positive reinforcement only, and an honest answer about how long it takes — including when the answer is "this needs a person, not an app".
Not released yetWhat makes it different
It adapts instead of counting days
Most training apps hand you a 42-day content calendar and hope. Heel reads what your dog did in the last ten repetitions and decides what to ask for next. Eighty per cent or better and it raises the difficulty. Below half and it drops back to the last step your dog was genuinely solid at, and says so without implying you did anything wrong.
It knows the kitchen isn't the park
Every owner arrives with the same sentence: he does it perfectly at home and completely ignores me outside. That isn't stubbornness and it isn't a failure. Dogs don't generalise — a dog that is perfect in the kitchen has learned the kitchen. Heel tracks every skill against every place separately and won't call something learned until it holds up in three of them.
It raises one thing at a time
Duration, distance and distraction are tracked as three separate numbers, and the content can't raise two at once — that rule fails the build, not a review. Raising two together is how you get a dog who suddenly can't do what they could do yesterday, and an owner who reads that as their own fault.
It fades the food on purpose
Every skill ladder has to end in a phase where the treats are deliberately thinned out. Skip that and you manufacture exactly the dog people complain about: one that works beautifully as long as your pockets are full.
What it won't do
It won't coach a bite, a dog fight, or a dog guarding something. Those get immediate safety steps and a referral to a qualified professional, and no technique at all. You cannot train a dog who is already over threshold, and an app that pretends otherwise is dangerous.
Everything safety-related stays free and open, including on a cancelled account.
- No streaks. No consecutive-day counters, nothing that punishes you for a bad fortnight. Streaks reward the person whose life happened to be easy.
- No pretending it worked. If six weeks of honest effort didn't move the numbers, the app says that plainly and points you at someone who can watch your dog in person.
- No invented progress. A weekly report needs a real denominator and several days of data before it will claim a trend. Below that it tells you the data is thin instead of drawing a hopeful line.
- No aversives, ever. No prong collars, no e-collars, no alpha rolls, no "dominance". Force-free throughout, not as a marketing position.
Your data stays on your phone
Every session, every repetition and every note lives in a database on your device. There is no account to create and no analytics SDK in the app — not a stripped-down one, none at all. If you film your dog, the video never leaves your phone.
The full detail is in the privacy policy, which describes what the app actually does rather than reserving every right we could think of.
The first week is free and doesn't ask for a card. After that it's $79.99 a year — about what one hour with a trainer costs.
Not released yet
Heel is in development. This page exists so there is somewhere honest to point at while that finishes. There is no mailing list and nothing to sign up for — if you want to know when it ships, the support page has an address you can write to.