Your neighbor invited you

Someone on your street wants to stop the fence-line barking. Here's exactly what you'd be joining — and what it can and can't see.

What it actually does

If your dog and the dog next door lose their minds every time they're both out back, there's a simple fix: take turns. The hard part isn't the taking turns, it's the knowing — you can't see over the fence, and nobody wants to text "about to let the dog out?" four times a day.

YardTime is a shared yard status for the two or three houses that share a fence line. Your neighbor taps once when their dog goes out. You see it. When the timer runs out — or they bring the dog in — you get a heads-up that the coast is clear. That's the whole app.

What your neighbors can see

This is the part worth reading before you install anything. Your group can see:

The name you pick for yourself, and the names of anyone else in your household
Your dogs' names
Whether your dogs are in or out, when they went out, when they're due back, and who set it
Your upcoming yard time, if you plan one ahead
The recent activity list — who let dogs out and when the yard cleared, for the last handful of times
A household photo, only if you choose to add one

That's the complete list. There is no address, no location, no GPS, no phone number, no email, and no access to your contacts. YardTime never asks for your location, because it doesn't need it — it only needs to know whether the yard is taken.

And it doesn't go to us, either. There is no YardTime server. Everything lives in your own iCloud account and is shared with your group through Apple's CloudKit, which means the people who made the app can't see your yard status even if they wanted to. No analytics, no ads, no tracking, nothing sold. The privacy policy spells all of it out.

What you'll need

An iPhone on iOS 17 or later, signed in to iCloud (Settings → [your name])
About two minutes

There's no account to create, no password, and no email sign-up. It's free, with no ads and nothing to buy.

How to join

Install YardTime from the App Store — the button's at the bottom of this page.
Tap the invite link your neighbor sent you, on your iPhone. It adds you to their group. If you tapped it before installing the app and it didn't work, install first, then tap the same link again.
Add your dog and pick the name you want your neighbors to see.

That's it — you're in. There's nothing else to set up.

Then what?

Day to day it's one big button. Tap it when the dog goes out and pick 15, 30 or 60 minutes (or leave it open-ended). When the timer's up, the app checks whether you're done — extend, or bring them in? — and frees the yard if you've moved on. You don't have to remember to flip it back.

If you know you'll want the yard at 7:30, you can plan it ahead, and your neighbor sees it coming. It's a heads-up, not a lock — nobody gets locked out of their own yard.

Once you get tired of opening the app at all, there's a widget for your Home and Lock Screen, an Apple Watch app, Siri ("Hey Siri, let the dog out"), and NFC tap tags — a sticker by the back door you tap on the way past, which flips the status without opening the app or even unlocking your phone.

Ready when you are.

Free · no account · 🐾 nothing tracked

Still deciding? Here's why we built it. Questions we haven't answered are welcome at [email protected] — a real person reads every message.