Counterella vs What Does This Mean?

Counterella counts down to the things you're looking forward to. Or counts up from something that already happened. The trip in three weeks, Mom's birthday, your first anniversary, 100 days smoke-free. Add an event, give it a date, and the app shows you how much time is left or how much has passed. On your Home Screen and Lock Screen too, if you like. The app is free, has no ads and doesn't need an account. Everything stays on your iPhone. ADD EVENTS AND KEEP TRACK All an event needs is a title and a date. If the date is in the future, Counterella counts down. If it's in the past, it counts up. The display updates live, down to the second, and a progress bar shows how much of the wait is already behind you. What else you can set: • Repeat: weekly, monthly or yearly. Birthdays or payday only need to be added once. • Category: Personal, Family, Work, Travel, Sports or Celebrations. You can filter the list by category. • An emoji and a color for each event, so they're easier to tell apart. • Reminders (more on that below). Sort the list by next date, title or recently created. Past events go to the archive with a swipe, or automatically if you prefer. You can bring in events straight from your calendar, and share any event as an image. With Siri and Shortcuts you can ask how long until an event, create a new one or open one directly. WIDGETS • One Counter (small): a single event with a progress ring • Counter List (medium): every event you've marked for the widget • Several Counters (medium): up to three events side by side • Lock Screen: circular, rectangular or inline REMINDERS Get a reminder a week, a day or an hour before, or when the event starts. For past events there are milestones: after 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 days, and on every anniversary. You choose the time of day for day-based reminders. LOOK AND FEEL Pick one of 13 accent colors, which also apply to the widgets, and choose light mode, dark mode or follow the system. You can change where the progress border starts and which way it runs. On the day of an event and at milestones there are small animations, which you can turn off. PRIVACY No tracking, no analytics, no account. Your events are stored only on your device and never sent anywhere.

A sentence you can't parse. An error message. A screenshot. You don't have to switch apps, and you don't have to describe the situation all over again. What Does This Mean? starts from what you deliberately share. Inside the iPhone share sheet it produces one explanation of that content, in a fixed output structure: • Topic • One-line answer • Plain-language breakdown • Example • Key points • Follow-up questions You can keep asking along the same passage. The previous answer stays in context, so you never restate the background. HOW IT WORKS • It receives the text you selected, or a single screenshot, from the system share sheet. • Text recognition and image cues for screenshots are produced on your device. When the evidence is too thin to support an explanation, it stops and says so instead of guessing an answer for you. • Before content leaves the device, the app matches a set of secret patterns locally — private keys, certificates, tokens, API keys, database connection strings, password assignments, email addresses, phone numbers, national ID numbers — and masks them in place. This masking applies to text. • Your understanding ledger stays on your own device. The app does not read the clipboard, does not ask for Photo Library access, and does not capture your screen or watch other apps in the background. • No ads, no third-party trackers, no behavioural analytics, no account, no sign-in. WHO PRODUCES THE EXPLANATION Apple's on-device model is the default and needs no setup — provided your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, has it turned on, and has finished downloading the model. If your device does not qualify, the app tells you which condition is missing. You can instead use your own API key (currently OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI; the provider list may change between versions). Redacted text then goes to the provider you picked. The key stays in the local Keychain (ThisDeviceOnly): not in the ledger, not synced to iCloud. Letting that provider look at the image itself is a separate consent: the app asks for that share alone, and only after you agree does it send a metadata-stripped JPEG with its long edge capped at 1280 — never the original file. Declining costs you nothing; the app answers from the on-device cues instead. OUTPUT LANGUAGES Traditional Chinese, English and Japanese, following the system or set by you. WHAT TO KNOW FIRST Explanations are produced by a generative language model, and the same input may produce different output at different times. What this app performs is this: it produces one explanation of what you shared, in the language you choose, in the fixed output structure above. It does not promise that any particular explanation is accurate, complete or suitable. An explanation is an aid to understanding — not legal, medical, financial, immigration or tax advice. For anything that matters, check it against the source. Image understanding is beta. REQUIREMENTS iOS 26 or later. The zero-setup on-device path needs an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence with it turned on; otherwise you supply your own third-party API key.