Most nursing timers stop being useful the moment you need your phone for something else. Cradle’s keeps running on the home screen — with the side it is on and a Stop button — until you end the feed.
Everything you reach for mid-feed sits in the bottom third of the screen. Nothing you need at 3am is parked up in a corner you would have to shift the baby to reach.
One tap starts the side you are on. Tap the other to switch and the first one pauses itself — you are never running two clocks or doing the subtraction later.
Tap Minimise and the feed collapses to a bar across the bottom of the home screen, still counting, with Stop right there. Check the time, answer a message, look at yesterday's log — the feed is still being timed.
Everything else keeps logging around it. Nursing, bottles, diapers and pumping all land on the same timeline, so the day reads in order rather than in categories.
So Cradle does not log them as one. Switch to Bottle, tap which it was, and the amount is one more tap — two to six ounces as chips, or type an exact number.
About one in seven sleep logs in Cradle is written between midnight and 5am. The app is dark by default, the timer is one tap from the home screen, and the running bar means you are not hunting for anything with one hand full.
Every side you timed adds up to something. Cradle reads the last seven days back to you — how often feeds land, how long they run, and whether left and right are actually even.
Because expressed, formula and supplement are logged as three different things, the mix comes back as a real split rather than a guess.
It will not tell you whether your baby is getting enough, and no app can. Intake, weight gain and supply are questions for your doctor, a lactation consultant or your health visitor — Cradle records what happened so you have something accurate to bring them, and nothing more than that.
The timer keeps running when you put the phone down. Left and right stay separate. And after a few days the log stops being a list and starts being an answer — how often feeds land, how long they run, and whether the sides are even.