Flashback
Morse
Adaptive, with no words-per-minute set anywhere. It measures the rhythm of whatever it is watching and re-measures it continuously, so a phone at ten words a minute and a cold hand on a Maglite both read fine.
Talk by light. Read any light.
Flashback
Type a message and it pulses out of your flashlight as Morse. Then the phone watches for a reply. Point the camera at anything that blinks — a flashlight across a courtyard, a lighthouse, a router LED — and it tells you what that light is saying, or what it is.
Download on the App Store
iPhone · iOS 17 or later
01 — Why
The messenger that works when everything is off.
No signal. No wifi. No account, no server, no message history. Two people who can see each other, and a flashlight.
Flashback is a working half-duplex messenger built on the oldest channel there is. It is also, and this is the half people keep for good, a reader: nearly every light you have ever walked past is saying something, and almost nobody can hear it. A harbor light is not blinking at random. It is telling you its name.
It is a toy with a manifesto. It is not a safety device, and the app says so before it flashes anything.
02 — How it works
Two halves, one light.
Flashback
Type it, or key it by hand like an operator. The Morse appears under each word as you go, with an honest estimate of how long it will take — because it will take a while. Then the flashlight does the rest.
Receiver
Point the reticle at any blinking light and press Watch. It works out the rhythm on its own — no speed to set, no calibration — and tells you what it found.
Then nothing
A message you have read fades and is gone about ten seconds later. Tap to hold it if you need a moment. Nothing is written down, which is the whole idea and also the name.
03 — Screens
Near-black, warm white, one red.
Built to be used in the dark without ruining your night vision, and to be legible at arm’s length across a room.
04 — What it reads
Six ways of listening.
Every interpreter gets the same stream of light and dark, and the most confident one wins. When it is not sure, it says so rather than inventing letters.
Lighthouses IALA
Measures the period and pattern, writes it in the notation used on charts — Fl(2) W 10s — and looks it up in a list of 432 lights. Sixteen lights share a rhythm on average, so without your position it gives you the characteristic and the size of the field rather than a name it cannot honestly pick.
Lights that spell Mo(A)
A safe-water mark flashes Morse A, over and over, forever. Flashback reads it as the letter it is and tells you what it means.
Airport beacons
White and green is a civil field. White-white-green is military. White and yellow is a water aerodrome. It reads the colors in order, which is the whole identification.
Blink codes
Three flashes, a pause, two flashes. Counts them, and says what they mean when the device is one it knows.
Tap code
The five-by-five prisoners’ grid, row then column. Beaten on pipes in Hanoi, and it works just as well through a window with a flashlight.
05 — And sending
Typed, or by hand.
A straight key
Press for light, release for dark, and the length of each is entirely up to your thumb. The same decoder that reads a lighthouse reads what you key, so the letters appear underneath as you make them.
A decoder ring Optional
A keyword walks alongside the message and shifts every letter by it — the same trick as the cardboard rings in cereal boxes, and as the CSP-488 in a signal locker. Charming, historical, and breakable by anyone with a pencil and a few hundred characters. The app says so itself.
Screen instead of the flashlight
Shorter range, gentler on the eyes, and it works on a phone whose flashlight you would rather not use. Sound and haptics mirror every dit and dah either way.
06 — Learn it
Nobody ever learned Morse from a chart.
There is a trainer inside the Flashback tab, and it teaches the way operators were actually taught: at full speed, by ear, from the first minute. It runs on a tone, a lamp on the screen and a tap in your hand — never the flashlight, which cannot switch quickly enough to teach at the speed the method needs.
Full speed from the first minute Koch
Two characters, at fifteen to twenty words a minute. Get ninety percent of them over a run of twenty and a third appears. Koch showed in 1936 that learning it slowly builds a counting habit that caps you around ten words a minute and then has to be painfully unlearned.
39 characters
The alphabet, the ten digits and the three punctuation marks that earn their place, in the order that puts the least similar sounds first. Your alphabet stays on screen with the newest character marked, and the one you are learning comes up three times as often as the rest.
Letters, groups, words, traffic
A progression, not four settings. Single characters teach the shapes. Five-character groups are where the next one starts arriving while you are still deciding about the last, which is the part that stops people. Then real words and operators’ shorthand — 348 of them, narrowed to what your alphabet can actually spell — and then short runs of real traffic, spaces and all.
Stretch the silence, never the character Farnsworth
The characters stay at full speed and the gaps between them are padded out instead. Shrink the padding as it gets easy and the shapes you already know arrive closer together until they arrive at speed. A slow di-dah is heard as two things and counted, which is the habit the method exists to prevent.
You key the answer back
Not multiple choice, and not a keyboard. You send it on the straight key with your thumb, and the same decoder that reads a lighthouse reads what you made.
Marked the way copy is marked
Character by character, in position — a dropped letter puts everything after it out of step, which is a real thing to have done rather than a technicality to be forgiven. At the end it lists what you missed, each with its Morse beside it.
Start wherever you like: if you already know the letters, pick the level and go straight to words. The one thing the trainer keeps is how far you have gotten.
07 — Price
$4.99, once.
One purchase. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no tiers, nothing to unlock. There is no account to make, because there is nothing to keep.
0network requests, ever
432lights in the bundled list
39characters the trainer teaches
08 — Questions
Frequently asked
How far does it reach?
As far as you can see the light, which depends entirely on the light and the dark. A phone flashlight across a room is easy; across a street at night is realistic; a lighthouse is a lighthouse. Daylight is the hard case, because everything the app does is measured relative to how bright the surroundings already are.
How fast is it?
Slow. Genuinely slow. “Hello world” takes about fifteen seconds at the medium setting, and the app tells you the number before you send so there are no surprises.
The limit is the flashlight itself: it cannot be switched on and off faster than about ten times a second, which caps everything at roughly twelve words a minute no matter what the setting says. The app is honest about that in Settings rather than pretending.
Do both people need the app?
To hold a conversation, yes — one phone flashes, the other watches. But reading does not need a second phone at all. A lighthouse, a hand-signaled flashlight, a router LED and an airport beacon have never heard of Flashback and it reads them anyway.
Do I need to know Morse?
No. Type in English and it does the encoding; anything it receives arrives as letters. The Morse is shown underneath as you type purely so you pick it up by accident.
If you would rather learn it properly there is a trainer built in, and it uses the method that actually works rather than a chart to memorize. It takes you from two characters to all 39, through single letters, five-character groups, real words and short runs of traffic, and you answer by keying it back rather than by tapping a button. See Learn it.
Why won’t the trainer slow down?
Because slowing the characters down is the one thing that reliably ruins it. A di-dah sent slowly is heard as two sounds and counted, and counting caps you around ten words a minute and then has to be unlearned. Sent at speed it is a single shape, the way a chord is a single sound.
So the characters stay at fifteen to twenty words a minute from the first minute, and what gets stretched instead is the silence between them — as much as you need at the start, less as it gets easy. That is Farnsworth spacing, and it is the standard way through.
The one thing that cannot teach at that speed is the flashlight: it will not switch faster than about ten times a second. So the trainer uses a tone, a lamp on the screen and a tap in your hand instead.
How long does learning it take?
Longer than you want and less than you fear, and it depends entirely on how often you sit down with it. The honest answer is that the app cannot promise you a number, so it does not print one. What it does instead is refuse to advance you until ninety percent of a run of twenty is right, which means the level you are on is always the level you are actually on.
Why would it want my location?
Only to name a lighthouse, and only if you turn it on — it is off when you install the app and everything else works without it.
The reason is arithmetic. Sixteen lights share any given rhythm on average; Fl R 5s is Chicago Harbor Light and it is also Eagle Harbor Light six hundred kilometers away and five other aids besides. Color halves the field and position collapses it. Without position the app tells you the characteristic and how many lights have it, which is the true answer, rather than picking one and sounding confident.
Your position is read from the phone’s own GNSS and compass, used to sort a list that is already on the device, and never stored or sent anywhere. There is nothing to send it with.
Is the scrambling secure?
No, and it does not pretend to be. Ring is a keyword cipher — a decoder ring, breakable by anyone with a pencil and a few hundred characters, and the app says exactly that on the settings screen. It is there because decoder rings are fun, not because it protects anything.
It is not a reason to trust a blinking light with something that matters.
Is this a safety or emergency tool?
No, and please do not treat it as one. It is a toy with a manifesto. If you are in trouble, use a phone, a radio, a whistle, or a real signaling mirror — anything whose reliability does not depend on a hobby app and a charged battery.
I am photosensitive.
The app asks before it ever flashes anything, and the warning has a way out that is not “agree”. Nothing pulses faster than ten times a second at any setting. You can send with the screen instead of the flashlight, and you can slow it right down. Both live in Settings.
Why does my message disappear?
Because nothing is kept. A message you have read fades about ten seconds later and is gone — tap it to hold it while you are still reading. There is no history, no thread, no export, and no copy on a server, because there is no server.
That is the point of the name, and it is the one design decision the app will not trade away for convenience.
09 — Privacy
Privacy Policy
Flashback collects nothing, sends nothing, and stores nothing about you. This is not a promise about how carefully data is handled. There is no data, and there is no networking code in the app to send it with.
What leaves your device
Nothing. Flashback has no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, no accounts, and no server. Turn on airplane mode and the app behaves identically, because it never had anything to say to the network in the first place.
The only outward links are the ones on this page — FAQ, privacy, terms and support — which open in your browser when you tap them in Settings. Tapping one leaves the app; nothing about you goes with it.
The camera
Flashback asks for camera access because reading a light is the entire second half of the app. Frames are examined on the device, one at a time, for brightness and color inside a small rectangle you position yourself. Nothing is recorded, photographed, saved or transmitted. The app has no access to your photo library and does not ask for it.
Your position, if you allow it
Flashback can ask for your location while you are using it, for one purpose: narrowing the bundled light list from the many lights that share a rhythm to the one you are actually looking at. The switch is off when you install the app, it lives in Settings under “Naming lights”, and everything else in the app works exactly the same without it.
When it is on, your coordinates and heading are read from the phone, compared against light positions already stored in the app, and discarded. They are not written to disk, not attached to anything, and not transmitted — the app has no way to transmit them.
What is written to disk
Your settings, and nothing else: speed, sound, haptics, sensitivity, which tab you were on, how far through the Morse trainer you have gotten and which drill you were doing. Messages you send and receive exist only in memory and are gone when they fade or when you leave.
If you use the Ring scrambler, the keyword you choose is held in the iOS Keychain rather than in preferences, and never leaves the device.
Children
Flashback collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.
Changes
If this ever stops being true, this page changes first and the app's version notes will say so plainly.
10 — Support
Support
Questions, bugs, a lighthouse whose characteristic we have wrong, or a blink code worth adding — write to support@honeywired.com.
Two things that help enormously: what the light was, and what the telemetry line in the corner of the watching screen said at the time. It reports frame rate, the speed it measured, and how many edges it saw, which is usually enough to tell whether the app misread the light or never really saw it.
11 — Terms
Terms & EULA
1. License
Flashback is licensed, not sold, under the standard Apple End User License Agreement for use across the iPhones connected to your Apple Account. It is a one-time purchase with no recurring charges.
2. Not a safety device
Flashback is a hobbyist toy. It is not a navigational instrument, not a distress signaling device, and not a substitute for radio, telephone or any certified means of communication. Do not rely on it in an emergency, at sea, in the air, or anywhere that a message failing to arrive would matter.
3. Light identification is informational
The bundled light list is compiled from published sources and community data and may be out of date, incomplete or wrong. Characteristics change; lights are relocated and discontinued. Never navigate by an identification made by this app. Consult the current official light list for your waters.
4. Photosensitivity
The app produces flashing light. It warns you before it does so for the first time and offers both a slower speed and a screen-only mode. If you are photosensitive, or in company with someone who is, please use those options or do not use the app.
5. Encryption features
The Ring cipher is deliberately weak and described as such in the app. It is not offered as, nor should it be relied upon for, protection of sensitive information.
6. Disclaimer
The app is provided “as is”. HoneyWired LLC is not liable for misread messages, misidentified lights, missed communications, or any loss arising from use of the app.
7. Acceptable use
Do not shine a bright light at aircraft, vehicles, vessels under way, or people who have not asked for it. Doing so is dangerous and, in many places, a criminal offense. What you signal, and at whom, is your responsibility.
End User License Agreement
This application is licensed under the standard Apple End User License Agreement. By downloading this app, you agree to the Apple Standard EULA.
HoneyWired LLC reserves all rights not expressly granted to you.
HoneyWired® is a registered trademark of HoneyWired LLC. Apple, iPhone, iOS and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used by Apple under license.
Portions of the bundled light data are © OpenStreetMap contributors and made available under the Open Database License.
··· ——— ···
Every light has been trying to tell you something.
Now you can read it.
Download on the App Store