One puzzle a day · English and Hindi · No account
Ten questions a day. Three minutes. Then you are done.
Sharpen is a daily word and trivia puzzle for Android. Ten questions, about twenty seconds each, roughly three minutes from the first question to your score. It rolls over at your own local midnight, and there is no second helping.
Everyone playing the same language and the same difficulty gets the same ten questions that day, so an 8/10 means the same thing to you as it does to a friend. Nothing is submitted anywhere and there is no leaderboard — comparing is something you do yourself, with a plain-text share card that gives away no answers.
Coming soon to Google Play.
What a day is made of
Six question formats, in a fixed set of ten. Difficulty ramps across the ten rather than adapting to how you are doing, so the set stays the same set for everybody who plays it.
Words
What a word means, its synonym, its antonym, and which word does not belong with the others.
Trivia
General knowledge, written to be globally relevant rather than a quiz about any one country.
Logic
One logic question in every set, in both languages and at every tier. Never more, never none.
When the ten are over you get your score, and you can walk back through every question to see what the answer was and why. A question you skipped, or ran the clock out on, is shown the same way as one you got wrong.
Three tiers, and why they do not move
Easy, Medium or Hard, chosen the first time you open the app and changeable in Settings. A change applies from the next puzzle, not to one you have already played.
The promise worth making about difficulty is the ordinal one: question nine is harder than question three, and Hard is harder than Easy. It deliberately does not adapt to you mid-puzzle — if it did, two people with 8/10 would have done different work, and the score would stop meaning anything.
Both languages run on the same globally relevant question spine. Hindi is a language option, not a region lock.
The streak, and the day you miss
A streak is days you actually played. The freeze exists so that one bad day does not erase a month of them.
One free freeze a week
Spent automatically on a day you miss, and refilled the following week. It bridges the gap without counting as a day played.
Today is never a miss
The current day stays open until it rolls over, so an unplayed today neither breaks your streak nor spends your freeze.
Stats you can read
A calendar of the last five weeks, with frozen days marked as what they were rather than quietly filled in, and a couple of charts under it.
An archive of past days
A day you missed can be opened and played, and the result is kept — but an archive play never counts toward the streak. A streak you can go back and repair is not a streak.
It works with the radio off
Puzzles are downloaded ahead of time, so the app needs a connection to stock up rather than to play.
Days in hand
The app fetches a couple of weeks of puzzles in the background. Once a day is on your phone it plays with no connection at all.
Nothing to sign in to
No account, no sign-up, no login, no profile. Your answers, times and streak are written to your phone and stay there.
Pause means pause
Close the app or take a call mid-puzzle and the clock stops. You come back to the same question with the time you had left, not to a countdown already running.
A reminder, if you want one
A daily nudge at a time you pick, scheduled on the device itself. Nothing is pushed to you from a server, and switching it off cancels it.
Ads, and where they are
Sharpen is free, and advertising is what pays for it. Saying where the ads are is easier than being asked.
There is a banner on the Home, Stats and Archive screens. One full-screen ad can appear after your score, when you tap to leave it — at most twice a day, and not at all during your first few days. An ad may appear when you open the app, behind a set of suppression rules: never over a puzzle you left unfinished, and not until you have finished three of them.
A few extras — an extra hint, skipping a question, opening a day from the archive — can be unlocked by choosing to watch a rewarded ad. Each one tells you what you get before it starts, and each one offers a way out.
There is no ad between questions, and neither the day’s puzzle nor your streak is ever behind one. Those are the two that would make the app not worth opening.
There is nothing to buy in this version: no purchases, no subscriptions and no payment of any kind. Ads are served by Google AdMob, and what that involves is set out in full on the privacy policy — including the one identifier it uses, and the choice you have about it.