Counter App: a name from search data and a clockwork that meshes

12 to 19 September 2026:

As of today, Counter App – Tally Pure is on Google Play. It was set up back in April, as a template with a pipeline that takes an app from architecture to release build in a single day. Then it sat for five months. The real work is in the last eight days: 23 commits, eleven builds.

A name from search data, not from a hunch

The app was first called Strichliste Pur, German for "tally sheet". It sounded right and was wrong. Google Trends for Germany, twelve months:

• "counter app" 203
• "zähler app" 100
• "dart zähler" 83
• "strichliste" 52, but "strichliste app" practically zero
• "klickzähler" practically zero, and the few who search it want a mouse button test

People looking for a tally sheet apparently want a template to print, not an app. So the searched words now come first and the brand last: Zähler App – Counter Pur in German, Counter App – Tally Pure in English. Both titles use 24 of the 30 characters allowed.

Darts stays out of the title on purpose. Someone searching for a darts counter wants a full x01 scorer. The app does darts 501 and 301 with a board of its own and checkout hints, but in the title that would have promised more than a template should.

Not the market leader's icon

The obvious icon would be four strokes and a crossbar. In exactly that form, that is the icon of the most downloaded tally app. With "Strichliste" in the name it would have looked like a copy. The new icon is a brass hand counter, the kind door staff hold at an entrance. The four strokes are still there, as one of many icons a counter can wear.

Six ways, one place

Counting happens in six places: in the counter itself, on the home screen, in the widget, in the notification, in the quick settings tile and through an NFC sticker. Every one of them calls the same place, CounterActions. That is the only way history, goal alerts and undo agree, wherever the tap happened.

Two rules live there that are easy to miss:

• Every addition is capped. A plain addition overflows on very large numbers and turns negative. Clamped at zero, that would look like a reset nobody ever triggered. So every counter stops at twelve digits.
• Reading and writing happen in one transaction. Rapid tapping loses no counts.

And a reset does not delete the history. It is not a counting event, and the statistics would be gone otherwise.

A clockwork that really meshes

Behind the app lies laid paper, and on it a brass clockwork turns slowly. The gears are generated photos, cut out and then measured: teeth counted, pitch circle found. A Python script builds the train from that and searches spacing and angle for each pair so that the teeth mesh over a full turn. Gears that overlap without meshing look as if they turn the wrong way. Everybody notices, even if nobody could say why.

If you prefer it calm, switch off the moving background in the settings.

Three instead of five

At first five counters were free. That is so many that hardly anyone ever reaches the limit, and then Pro does not sell. Now it is three, and on those everything works: widget, tile, NFC, notification, goals, templates and every theme. No theme is locked. Charging for a darker shade of dark looks petty, and the number of counters is the clearer thing to sell.

While switching, it turned out that the store listing still said "five", and so did this website. Both are fixed now.

What did not make it into the app

A Wear OS app was built and working. It was still dropped on 16 September, before the first release: a second module, its own track on the Play Store, its own screenshots. That would have been more upkeep than it was worth.

What else belongs to it

• The NFC stickers got a menu of their own. At the bottom of a long settings page, testers neither found the counter choice nor understood what to do.
• 52 languages, switchable inside the app. German and English are written by hand, and so are Traditional Chinese, Filipino and Malay, because Google Play does not translate those automatically. Play translates the rest when a build is uploaded as a draft.
• Play Billing from 7 to 9, Android target version 36.
• 148 tests, all green.

Get the app on Google Play or read the info page.