I’ve got a secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but a few months ago I released a new app.

This was around the time I introduced Guild Ads, and I needed another app to advertise in Sticky Widgets. I’d been kicking around an idea for a super simple tally counter for a while. My son is really into board games, card games, and other similar things, and we needed an easy way to keep track of scores. Notes was fine, but it wasn’t as quick or simple as I wanted it to be.

There are other apps that can do this, but it also gave me an excuse to try an interface idea I’d had: flexibly resizable rectangles that turn your phone’s screen into a collection of touch areas. I spent a weekend or so working on it, and KeepCount was born.

The idea behind KeepCount is that your phone is a blank slate. You can divide it into one or many (or many, many) touch areas and assign a counter to each one. In its simplest form, you might have Tyler against Arlo, with a color-coded region for each person. Every time you tap someone’s region, their score goes up by one.

But I quickly ran into other use cases. What if you wanted to count down? What if you wanted to enter an arbitrary number? And, of course, you don’t have to stop at two counters. You can have three, four, or 50.

At a Little League baseball game this summer, for example, I used separate regions to track each team’s score, the number of runs in the current inning—there was a five-run limit per inning—and the number of outs. Everything was right there, easy to see and tap.

It’s great for keeping score, but also for counting reps, taking classroom attendance, checking inventory, or tracking personal goals and habits. Really, any situation where you want to keep count of something.

KeepCount has been in the App Store for a few months now, but ahead of iOS 27, I got excited about the ridiculously extra-large widget size that’s now available. KeepCount didn’t have any widgets at all, so I decided it was time to add them.

Alongside the widgets came Siri Shortcuts integration. I also recently added a handy long-press gesture that makes it easy to adjust a counter in several different ways, along with a whole lot of polish and additional features. I tossed in a bunch of localization work, too.

Version 1.6 is now in the store. Download KeepCount for free on the App Store.