Reckon
A short daily mental arithmetic session built around named strategies and worked examples rather than timed drills. For people who want to get quicker without a leaderboard watching.
- In development
- iOS, iPadOS
- 2026
- iOS engineering and design
Screens
The constraint
Most mental-maths apps are a stopwatch with a leaderboard bolted on. They measure how fast you already are, say nothing about why an answer was wrong, and lean on streaks to pull you back. Reckon starts from the opposite premise: five to eight minutes a day, no calculator, and no timer on the screen. It should feel like going to a gym, not sitting an exam.
Decisions
- Technique first, repetition second
- Every new skill arrives with a named strategy such as make a ten or round and correct, plus a worked example. The method is taught rather than the repetition drilled.
- Levels per skill, never one global number
- A single score hides which skill is holding you back. Tracking a level per skill keeps progress legible and lets each day's session be built from the weakest one.
- The learning engine is unit tested
- Placement, adaptive difficulty, spaced review, interleaving and mistake diagnosis are all deterministic and covered by tests, because a trainer that misjudges what you know is worse than no trainer.
What it does
- A three minute placement that reads you skill by skill
- Named strategies with worked examples instead of timed drills
- A daily session mixing weakest skill, spaced review and one challenge
- Works offline, with sessions cached a week ahead
- One reminder a day at most, and no leaderboards
How it is built
- SwiftUI, iPhone plus a bespoke iPad layout
- CloudKit for sharing and sync
- On-device store
- App Store, in development
- Swift · SwiftUI · CloudKit · WidgetKit · StoreKit 2