I wanted a counter I would actually reach for every day, so I built one that counts fast, looks good at night, and tells me whether I am ahead or behind my goal. Tally tracks anything, shows the trend, and keeps the data on the device.
Tally is a phone app for counting things, built for one-handed daily use. You can keep as many counters as you want, each with its own name and color, and every tap gives a big target to hit, a physical buzz, a short tick sound, and a little burst of animation so the count feels solid.
Beyond the raw number, Tally shows you the trend. It reports how fast you are counting (per day, week, month, or year), and you can set the start date so switching over from another app does not throw off the averages. Set a target and a deadline and it tells you, in real time, whether you are ahead or behind the pace you need. A chart shows your history over the last week, month, quarter, or all time.
Everything stays on your phone. Tally keeps an automatic daily backup, lets you back up and restore by hand, and can export your counts to a spreadsheet file. No accounts, no cloud, no tracking.
Tally exists because I mentioned to Open Claw that I use and love Taptic: Tally Counter on iOS, and that nothing like it existed for Android. A few minutes later it replied with an installable app: the first version of Tally. If you are on iOS, go get Taptic; it is the original inspiration for everything here.
Features
- Keep as many counters as you want, each with its own name, emoji, and accent color
- Every tap lands with a satisfying buzz, tick, and burst of animation, so you never wonder whether it registered
- Big buttons anchored to the bottom of the screen, easy to hit with a thumb one-handed
- See your pace per day, week, month, or year, with a chart of your history over any time range
- Set a target and a deadline and know at a glance whether you are ahead or behind
- Moving over from another app? Set a starting count and start date and your averages stay honest
- Automatic daily backups, manual backup and restore, and spreadsheet export
- Everything stays on your phone: no accounts, no cloud, no tracking, no permissions
- Pure-black dark theme that looks great at night and sips battery on OLED screens
Under the hood
- —MVVM with ViewModel, StateFlow, and a repository over Room DAOs; the UI never touches the database directly, so every screen updates reactively from one source of truth
- —History is one row per counter per day with a uniqueness constraint; a tap upserts today's row, which keeps the table tiny and makes charts and daily stats a simple query
- —Pace diff is computed live as actual rate minus required rate (target divided by days from start to deadline), so the ahead/behind readout updates on every tap
- —Particle bursts run on a Choreographer frame callback instead of standard Compose animatables, sidestepping a Samsung animation-rate regression so effects stay smooth on every device
- —The tick is a 1.6 KB synthesized percussive sample, 18 ms of layered frequencies played through SoundPool, so audio feedback lands with no perceptible latency
- —Daily auto-backup writes to a Downloads folder that survives uninstall, keeps a rolling window of recent backups, and pings the media scanner so files show up immediately over USB