Countism is a mobile app idea that I have been working on and thinking about for a long time. Even though I have been thinking of the idea for a while and even did some initial work, I did not plan to actually build and release the app – that was always a question that was up in air. My initial work was really just experimental to see if it was something I could build easily enough to make it worth the effort, and to see if my idea would be viable in app form.

My mindset on this changed when I publicly declared this year as a year of making stuff, and committed to releasing 4 new projects this year. I knew Countism had to be one of those 4 projects – especially since pulling my other 2 apps from the app store last year. I wanted another app in the App Store and Google Play – a good app.

What is Countism?

Countism is an advanced tally counter app with timeseries data and graphs. You can use it to count anything that can’t be counted or tracked automatically. This can be anything – Glasses of Water, Sodas, Workouts, How many times you swear, How many hours you work at your job, etc.

Why Make Countism?

I fist came up with the idea for Countism when I wanted to track how many glasses of water I drank per day. This sounds like a fairly easy need to fill with existing apps, but it turned out not to be.

There are many tally counter apps on the app stores, but surprisingly few that have timeseries data – most are just simple incremental counters with limited usefulness. The few that do keep timseries data are mostly apps focused on habit and productivity niches, which have limited general usefulness if you don’t have an end goal in mind for what you’re tracking. There’s a whole other group of tally counter apps that simply have very poor UI/UX and are painful to use and look at.

Simply put: I saw a market opportunity to fill my need and others like it, and have already recieved positive feedback from real paying users that validate this hole in the market.

How Can I Get Countism?

Glad you asked! You can head over to the Countism website to find the links to the iOS App Store and Google Play for Android devices.

How Did You Make Countism?

Good question. There are many development tools out there for building mobile apps, but I chose Appcelerator Titanium for Countism because it was full-featured and allowed me to target both iOS and Android with a single JavaScript codebase. I was also already very familiar and comfortable with it, as I have built and released multiple other mobile apps with it.

I gave React Native a try early in development, but it lacked too many features that I needed for an app like Countism. Namely, it lacked: Table Views and SQLite. There are some 3rd party components for these, but they were not complete at the time, and Android support for these is still a question as of the time of writing. I will probably build another app with React Native at a later time, but it needs a lot more maturity first.