VWLSS — Press Kit

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 23, 2026

VWLSS, a Daily Missing-Vowels Word Puzzle for iPhone, Launches Today from Shark River Studios

A new category, eight consonant-only clues, and a flower for every solve.

Shark River Studios LLC today released VWLSS (pronounced “vowel-less”), a daily word puzzle for iPhone that strips the vowels out of eight clues and asks players to put them back. Each challenge centers on one category — Capital Cities, Shakespeare Plays, Jazz Standards — and gives the player exactly eight consonant skeletons to recognize.

The mechanic is simple to explain and immediate to feel. The category narrows the field. The consonants give the shape. The answer arrives, often involuntarily, somewhere in the middle. A clue reading BJNG under the category Capital Cities resolves to Beijing in seconds — but a clue from a less familiar category can sit for minutes, waiting for the recognition the consonants alone won’t deliver.

VWLSS publishes a new puzzle six mornings a week, Monday through Saturday. Every finished challenge becomes an eight-petal flower on the player’s history garden — one petal per clue, colored by what was solved, missed, or passed. The garden builds over time as a quiet record of return. There are no leaderboards. There are no penalties for missing a day.

For players who want one more challenge, Garden Pass is the app’s optional auto-renewing subscription. It opens the Sunday Bonus Challenge — a harder weekly puzzle with a trickier category and less merciful cluing — and the full back catalog of past Daily Challenges. Garden Pass starts with a 2-week free trial and is offered as an annual subscription.

VWLSS supports both keyboard and voice input. The app’s speech recognition is tuned for the patterns the game produces — vowel ambiguity, compound words, spoken spellings — and handles answers spoken aloud with more reliability than generic dictation.

The app launches free on the App Store. Daily Challenges Monday through Saturday are available to all players. There are no ads and no accounts. Player history lives on the device.

Availability
VWLSS is available now on the App Store for iPhone.

About Shark River Studios
Shark River Studios LLC is an independent software studio building calm, thoughtful applications for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Other releases from the studio include Purr & Relax, a companion-style purr generator for sleep and rest, and No Z, a macOS menu bar utility for keeping the Mac awake during long-running tasks.

Press Contact
Shark River Studios LLC
support@sharkriverstudios.com
sharkriverstudios.com/vwlss

VWLSS is a daily word puzzle for iPhone where every vowel has been removed — one category, eight clues, every morning.

VWLSS is a daily word puzzle for iPhone. Each challenge gives the player one category and eight consonant-only clues. The category narrows the field; the consonants give the shape; the answer arrives somewhere in the middle. A new puzzle appears Monday through Saturday, with a tougher Sunday Bonus available through Garden Pass, the app’s optional subscription.

VWLSS (pronounced “vowel-less”) is a daily missing-vowels word puzzle for iPhone. Each challenge has a single category and eight clues, with every clue shown as only its consonants. The player puts the vowels back, either by typing or by speaking aloud. Difficulty depends on the category: “BJNG” under Capital Cities is Beijing in seconds; under a less familiar category like Jazz Standards or Periodic Elements, an eight-clue round can take several minutes.

A new puzzle is published Monday through Saturday and is free for all players. Sundays are reserved for the Sunday Bonus Challenge — a harder weekly puzzle available to subscribers of Garden Pass, the app’s optional auto-renewing subscription. Garden Pass also opens the full back catalog of past Daily Challenges. Non-subscribers can unlock individual past challenges with Seeds, the app’s in-game currency earned through play.

Each completed challenge is recorded as an eight-petal flower in the player’s history view — one petal per clue, colored by what was solved, missed, or passed. There are no leaderboards, no streak counters, and no notifications beyond optional daily reminders that a new puzzle is available.

Voice input uses Apple’s on-device speech recognition, tuned for vowel ambiguity, compound words, and spoken spellings. Typed answers are matched forgivingly across capitalization, spacing, punctuation, and accents.

VWLSS requires no account, contains no ads, and stores history on the device.

Shark River Studios LLC is an independent software studio building calm, thoughtful applications for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The studio’s other releases include Purr & Relax, a companion-style purr generator for sleep and rest, and No Z, a macOS menu bar utility for keeping the Mac awake during long-running tasks.