Last updated 25 September 2026
Ten bars. One lights up. Hit it before your time runs out. If something is not behaving the way this page describes, write to us. The address is at the bottom, and a person reads it.
How the game works
What decides how long I get?
Another player. The bar stays lit for exactly as long as the 49th-percentile player takes on your level. That is the whole design: if you miss it, you were slower than half the field, by definition. It is not a difficulty setting we picked.
What does it take to move up a level?
Five rounds. Your average across those five has to land in the top 50% of the players on that level. Clear it and you take a slot on the rung above, and the slot you leave behind goes back to the field for somebody else.
Can I be sent back down?
No. Never. Every level you reach is yours to keep, however badly a later run goes.
Why does the app say the field is “modelled”?
A percentile ladder cannot work on its first day: the time to beat is the 49th-percentile player’s time, so with nobody on a level there is nothing to hand out. Until a level has at least 25 real players, Apex 49 uses a statistical model of human reaction time instead, and the Ladder screen says so plainly on every rung that is still modelled. Once a level fills, it switches to real percentiles from real players.
How many levels are there?
Forty, from Twitch up through Quick, Sharp, Wired, Instinct, Blur, Phantom, Lightning, Singular and Inhuman, to Apex. The field halves with every rung and the time to beat tightens with it.
Timing
Is the millisecond figure real, or decorative?
Real. Your tap is stamped against the display’s own refresh, the same clock the bar lit up on, rather than counted in frames after the fact. The light-up is deliberately given no animation, because a fade would smear the very moment you are being timed against.
My times look slower than I expected.
A few things genuinely cost you milliseconds: a case or screen protector, playing with the phone flat on a table rather than in your hands, and Low Power Mode, which can reduce the display’s refresh rate. Typical human reaction to a visual cue is around 250 ms at the very fastest, and 300 to 500 ms is ordinary.
Accounts, ranks and iCloud
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address to hand over. The app works fully signed out.
Then what is Game Center for?
Your personal rank and the social leaderboards. Signing in to Game Center is optional and adds your standing against named players. The shared field, meaning the time to beat, the cut-off and the population, comes from Apple CloudKit instead, precisely because CloudKit can be read without an account and Game Center cannot. That split is why signed-out players still get a real time to beat.
My rank is missing or says I am not signed in.
Open the Settings app, go to Game Center, and check you are signed in there. Then reopen Apex 49 and use the Game Center controls on the RECORD screen. If you declined the sign-in prompt, iOS will not ask again from inside the app. It has to be done in Settings.
Playing
Portrait or landscape?
Both. Portrait gives you two rows of five bars, landscape a single row of ten. Ten bars at every level, so the layout you learn never changes underneath you.
Can I turn off the sound, the vibration or the particles?
Yes, each independently. They are on the RECORD screen.
I tapped before the bar lit, or hit the wrong one.
Both are scored, not ignored. A miss costs you twice the time you were given, which is deliberate: guessing early should be worse than reacting late.
Your data
Your ladder progress, your records and your preferences live on your device. Deleting the app removes them, and they are not backed up to us. What leaves the device is only your per-level average, your fastest single reaction, and an account identifier supplied by Apple so that each player has one record per level rather than a pile of duplicates.
There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking and no third-party SDK of any kind in Apex 49. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
How do I delete what the app has stored about me?
Email the address below and say so. We will remove your leaderboard records. Deleting the app clears everything held on the device itself.
Requirements
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Operating system | iOS 17.0 or later |
| Devices | iPhone and iPad |
| Network | Optional. The game is fully playable offline; the last real field it saw is cached and reused |
| Purchases | None. No subscriptions, no advertising, no in-app purchases |
Contact
Write to support@privacyatlas.org. Tell us your device, your iOS version and what the app did, and if it is a timing complaint, tell us the level and the number it showed you.
APEX 49 · PRIVACY ATLAS