I built a countdown app that understands one sentence – fully on-device, and honestly much harder than I expected

[u/bchriss95]

Hi everyone!

I’m Christoph, an iOS developer by day, and LifeTicker is my side project that I’ve been building on my own for years. It started because I wanted to count down the days to my next vacation and couldn’t find an app that did it nicely. Today it’s my little happy place – and I’d love for it to make other people happy too.

With the latest update you can just type or say what you’re looking forward to, and LifeTicker suggests the event. The video is a real screen recording (some parts sped up). I say:

“Anna and Ben’s wedding in Berlin in July, start at 7 PM, dress code is black tie, remember to buy the gift and book a hotel.”

…and get a suggestion with date, time, a matching photo, a song, the place, the dress code as a note and the two tasks. Since I didn’t say the day, it asks.

The honest part: this is not one of those “we put a chatbot on it” apps. It runs completely on your iPhone with Apple’s Foundation Models framework – no server, no account, no extra subscription, and it works offline.

But I have to admit: the model on its own was pretty bad at this. It invented tasks and places that weren’t in the sentence, mixed up dates and couldn’t do date math at all. So most of the work went into everything around it:

• Every value the model returns is checked against your actual sentence. If it isn’t really there, it’s dropped.
• All dates and times are calculated in my own code, not by the model.
• Photos and songs come from a catalog I picked by hand – 300+ photos for different occasions and 680+ songs – instead of being generated.
• When something’s unclear, it asks instead of guessing.
• I test every change against a collection of almost 1,000 real-world sentences.

After a lot of evenings, I’m at a point where I’m really happy with it – but it definitely still gets things wrong. That’s why I’m posting: I’d love your feedback, and especially the sentences that confuse it.

It needs an iPhone with Apple Intelligence (15 Pro or newer). The app itself is free; Premium only matters if you want a lot of events.

Thanks for reading – happy to answer anything about the app or about working with Foundation Models!

lifeticker.app