What it does
One job, done properly, and a long list of refusals
Most of the work of the last four years has been saying no. What follows is the whole feature list, and then the features that will never arrive, with the reason each one was turned down.
The whole list
Six things it does
If something is not here, it is not in the application. That is not an oversight.
+1
Counts up
A button that fills the bottom half of the screen. It is impossible to miss with a cold thumb, and it buzzes so you know it worked without looking.
-1
Counts back down
A smaller button, deliberately harder to hit by accident, for when you counted the same sheep twice.
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Several tallies at once
Name them, colour them, reorder them, swipe between them. Nine fit on a screen before anything has to scroll.
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Counts in your pocket
With the screen locked, the volume buttons add and subtract. You can count a whole flock without taking the phone out.
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Keeps sessions
Every count closes as a dated session with its totals. Nothing is overwritten, and nothing needs saving; there is no save button.
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Exports plain CSV
One file, one row per session, opens in any spreadsheet on earth. Send it wherever you like. We never see it.
What it will never do
Four things it refuses, and why
These are not on a roadmap. They have been considered, and the answer is no.
No account, ever
An account needs a server, a database, a password reset email and somebody to be responsible for all three at three in the morning. The tally of how many blue tits you saw does not justify any of that.
No cloud sync by default
Your counts are in the application's own storage on your own phone. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to. If you want a copy elsewhere, you make it yourself, on purpose.
No analytics, no crash reports, no identifier
We do not know how many tallies you keep, what you named them, or whether you opened the application today. We find out about bugs the old way: somebody sends an email.
No graphs, no streaks, no badges
It is a counter. It will not congratulate you, remind you, or draw a line chart of your week. If you want those, export the CSV and make them in a spreadsheet that is better at it.
Offline
What happens in a field with no signal
Which is to say: exactly what happens everywhere else, because the application has never needed a connection for anything but its own download.
You open it in aeroplane mode
It starts in under a second and shows the tally you used last. There is no loading screen, because there is nothing to load from anywhere.
You count for six hours
Every tap is written to the phone's own storage as it happens. A flat battery or a dropped phone costs you nothing but the taps you had not made yet.
You come back to a signal
Nothing happens. No queue drains, no sync spinner turns, no notification appears. The application does not know you were ever offline, because it was never online.
You close the session
It is filed with its date and its totals, and it stays on the phone until you delete it or the phone does.
Backups
So what if you want a copy somewhere safe?
You can have one. You just have to ask for it, every time, and you choose where it goes. This is the only part of the application that touches anything outside the phone.
Export the file
One tap makes a CSV of every session, or of one tally. It is a text file. You can read it yourself and check that nothing strange is in it.
Put it where you want it
Email it to yourself, drop it in whichever cloud drive you already pay for, or copy it onto a computer with a cable. All of those are somebody else's service, not ours.
Bring it back
Import the same file on any phone and the sessions return with their dates intact. That is how the application moves house.
That really is all of it
If the list above is what you need, the price is on one line and there is nothing to cancel later.