Apple / lifestyle / FACING DEATH
REVIEW
Facing Death is an earnest indie attempt at the subject most apps refuse to touch.
A free iPhone app for writing your own farewell card, drafting an epitaph, and keeping an end-of-life checklist — sincere, small, and clearly the work of one developer.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Almost every app on the App Store is built around the assumption that you’ll keep using it tomorrow. Facing Death, a free iPhone app from solo developer Man Hung Sun, is built around the assumption that you won’t. It is a small collection of writing prompts — farewell card, notes, epitaph, action plan, checklist, photo album — for the one document most people never get around to writing.
The premise is unfashionable and the execution is modest, but the intent is clean. There is no subscription, no analytics dashboard, no streaks. You open it, you write something you have been avoiding writing, you close it. That is the whole loop.
Facing Death does not pretend to be a hospice planner or a legal will. It is closer to a private notebook for the subject most people will not open one for — and on those terms, it earns the room it asks for.
Facing Death does not pretend to be a hospice planner or a legal will. It is closer to a private notebook for the subject most people will not open one for.
FEATURES
The app is built around a small set of writing prompts. You can draft a farewell card to someone specific, jot free-form notes, write an epitaph, and lay out an action plan — funeral preferences, who to call, which accounts need closing, where the documents are. A checklist view lets you tick through those items at a glance instead of scrolling the notes.
A photo album sits alongside the writing tools for keepsakes — meaningful images, family records, things you want kept with the rest of the document. Everything lives locally on the device.
HealthKit integration reads daily step count and shows it back in the app. The connection to the rest of the experience is loose — it sits somewhere between "live well in the time you have" and an unrelated wellness feature — but it is optional and does not push anything back to Health.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The tone is the thing the app gets most right. There is no gamification, no streaks badge for thinking about your own mortality, no upsell pop-up between the epitaph screen and the action plan. It treats the subject the way the subject deserves to be treated — quietly, with room to write.
It is also free, with no advertising and no subscription tier waiting behind a checkbox. For an indie iPhone-only release on a topic the major productivity apps will never build for, that pricing is the right call.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The polish gap is real. Copy reads as second-language English in places, the UI is closer to a 2018 utility app than a 2026 SwiftUI release, and the screenshots on the App Store listing are from an iPhone 8 Plus simulator. None of that is disqualifying for a free indie tool, but it does set expectations: this is a notebook with structure, not a finished end-of-life-planning product.
There is no sync, no export to PDF, no encrypted backup, and no way to designate a trusted contact who can open the file after you're gone — which is the single most important feature an app in this category could offer. A loved one would need your unlocked phone and the app open to read any of it. The HealthKit step counter is the weakest inclusion and would be better dropped in favour of one of those missing essentials.
CONCLUSION
Facing Death is worth the install if you want a private, no-pressure place to start writing the things you have been putting off — a farewell letter, the practical list, an epitaph you want to control yourself. Treat it as a journal, not a vault. For anything that needs to survive you, copy it out somewhere your family can actually reach. Watch for a version that adds export and a trusted-contact handoff; that is the release that would make this a recommend rather than a respectful nod.