Counting your days without handing over an account

Think about what a complete day-count actually is. Every country you entered, the date you arrived, the date you left, repeated for years. That is not a preference file. It is a movement history, and it is more revealing than most of what people are careful about.

Which makes the usual first screen — create an account — a strange thing to accept without noticing.

There is no account here

Track Country Days has no sign-up, no email, no password and no server holding your history. The database is a file on your phone. We could not look up your travel if we wanted to, because there is nowhere for us to look.

That is a structural property, not a promise about our conduct. Policies change and companies get sold; an architecture with no copy of your data cannot quietly start having one.

What this costs you

It would be dishonest to present this as free. Two real trade-offs:

• No sync. Your phone and your tablet keep separate histories. There is no account to tie them together, because that is the same account we chose not to have.

• Delete the app and the history goes with it. There is no server-side copy to restore from. Moving to a new phone means exporting a backup file and importing it — a deliberate step, not an automatic one.

If seamless multi-device sync matters more to you than data locality, an account-based tracker is the better fit, and we would rather you knew that now than found out later.

The claim we deliberately do not make

You will see apps promise that your location never leaves your device. We used to have a line like that. We removed it, because it was not true of us.

When the app turns a coordinate into a country name, it asks the operating system's geocoder first, and that service is Apple's or Google's — so while you are online, a coordinate can leave the phone on its way to them. Offline, it never does: the fallback is a boundary map bundled in the app, which is also what bulk photo scanning uses.

So the precise statement is narrower than the marketing one, and it is the one we can stand behind: your countries, dates and coordinates never reach our servers, and never go into analytics, push, crash reporting or billing. Those tools see that a screen was opened, never where you were.

A smaller true claim is worth more than a larger one you have to walk back.

Offline-first is not the same as offline-only

The app works with no signal because that is when you tend to need it — landing somewhere, at a border desk, on a train between countries. Counting, rules and history are all local, so they do not wait on a network.

It still uses the network when there is something worth fetching. It just never needs it to answer the question you actually care about.

As always: this is day tracking, not immigration or tax advice. We count the days — what they mean for your circumstances is a question for a professional.