A guided companion for running a liquid aquarium test kit — one instruction at a time, timers overlapping so the waiting collapses.
Dropwise on the App Store — for iPhone and iPad.
Email dropwise.support@gmail.com. It helps to include:
This is a one-person project, so replies are not instant — but every email is read.
No. The whole app works in aeroplane mode, permanently. It makes no network requests at all, because there is no server behind it.
No. There is no sign-in and nothing to remember.
The app ships with procedures for a five-test freshwater liquid kit, a six-test freshwater kit, and a GH & KH drop-count pair — the shapes the common liquid kits take. If your kit is different, build it yourself: the kit builder lets you enter any kit, with your own tests, drop counts, waiting times and scale values.
Because it cannot show them accurately. Phone screens vary by model, brightness, colour profile and age, so an on-screen swatch is a worse reference than the printed scale in your hand — and if it were slightly wrong, you would misread your tank. The app shows the numbers from the scale and asks you to match the tube against your own card or the scale printed on your own box.
No, and that is deliberate. Dropwise tells you what your numbers are: whether they sit inside the range you set, how they have moved, what the pattern across ammonia, nitrite and nitrate looks like, and what a water change of a given size would do to a number arithmetically. It does not prescribe treatments, identify diseases or recommend products. Nobody can see your tank through an app, and decisions about your livestock should be yours.
Unlimited guided test sessions, unlimited tanks, the custom kit builder, reminders, custom parameters, and CSV export. One payment, no subscription, nothing further to pay.
One tank, three complete guided sessions, manual logging, your full history, the trends, the insight cards and the calculators, the Learn articles — and the full JSON backup and restore, permanently. Your readings are yours whether you pay or not.
It should return by itself the next time the app opens. If it has not, use Settings → Restore a previous purchase, signed in with the same Apple ID that bought it.
In one file on your device, with any photographs you have attached kept beside it. Settings → Export as JSON hands you the whole thing — tanks, readings, events, settings and photographs — free, on any version. Import from backup puts it back, also free. That is deliberate: your data should never be trapped inside somebody else's app.
You can attach one to any reading or event, and it shows on that tank's journal. It stays on your device and is never uploaded — there is nowhere for it to go. Its metadata is removed before it is saved, including any location your camera recorded, so a backup you share cannot give away where the photograph was taken.
Photographs are the one thing in the app big enough to notice: a few hundred of them run to tens of megabytes, and they count towards your device's own backup. Settings → Photographs shows how much space they use and can delete older ones — the readings, notes and events they belong to are left exactly as they were.
Testing with a child is exactly how this app came about — but test kit reagents are chemicals, and the safety information the app shows before your first session is worth reading together. Keep the bottles away from children when not in use, avoid skin and eye contact, wash hands afterwards, and follow the safety information supplied with your own kit.