Press Kit

In a nutshell 🥜

Emoji Countdown counts down to the days you are looking forward to, each one pinned to a favourite emoji 🎉. Pick a date, set an emoji, and the countdown lives on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, StandBy and Apple Watch, so the next big thing is always a glance away.

It has been on the App Store since 2020, has passed 150,000 downloads, and Apple has featured it several times. Birthdays 🎂, holidays 🎄, weddings 💍, trips ✈️, the last day of work 🏖️: no other countdown app lets you express every event with emoji, so every countdown looks like the moment it represents. The widgets are free, and your countdowns sync through your own iCloud.

Coming with iOS 27 ✨

Emoji Countdown is ready for iOS 27. Two things change: you can talk to your countdowns, and you can watch them unfold across the screen. Both arrive in a free update alongside Apple’s iOS 27 release this autumn, and the update needs iOS 27. If you would like to try it before then join the beta or, get in touch and we will sort you out with anything you need.

Talk to your countdowns 🗣️

Countdowns now speak calendar. Emoji Countdown adopts the iOS 27 calendar schema, so Siri and Apple Intelligence treat every countdown as an event they already understand, with nothing to set up.

Ask “When is Dad’s birthday?” and Siri answers with the time remaining. Say “Create an event called Dad’s Birthday on 25 December” and a 🎉 countdown appears, without the app opening. “Move Dad’s Birthday to 26 December” and “Delete the Dad’s Birthday event” work the same way, and so does “How many countdowns do I have?”

Siri also knows what you are looking at. Open a countdown, ask “When is this?” or say “Delete this one”, and you are understood without naming it.

Everything is in Spotlight too, findable by name or by what the emoji actually means. Search “birthday cake” and the untitled 🎂 countdown comes up.

Every action is a Shortcuts action as well, so countdowns can be created, moved and read out from the Action button, Control Centre, the Lock Screen, Back Tap, an NFC tag or an automation. All of it is free. None of it sits behind the Pro subscription.

Watch them unfold 🪄

Drag the window from phone width out to a full iPad and the same countdowns unfold with it.

Why emoji 🤔

There are a lot of countdown apps. Here is why people pick this one.

Every countdown looks like its moment. A 🎂 for the birthday, a ✈️ for the trip, a 💍 for the wedding. You can tell them apart from across the room, and no other countdown app leads with emoji.

Free widgets. Home Screen, Lock Screen and StandBy widgets are included, with no subscription required. Plenty of competitors charge for theirs.

Make it yours. Any emoji, any colour, with gradients, blur effects, borders and themes for the widgets.

One tap from your calendar. Birthdays, holidays and deadlines come straight in from the iOS Calendar, so nothing needs typing twice.

Set it once. Birthdays and holidays repeat automatically, rolling over to next year the moment they pass.

On your wrist. A native Apple Watch app, with iCloud keeping iPhone, iPad and Watch in step.

Features 🤩

Free

• Home Screen, Lock Screen and StandBy widgets
• Any emoji for any countdown, so every event looks like the moment it represents
• Apple Watch app, so your countdowns are on your wrist too
• Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts, with the iOS 27 calendar schema coming this autumn
• A month, quarter and year progress widget
• Dark Mode
• iCloud sync across iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch

Pro

• Widget customisation: colours, gradients, blur effects, borders and themes
• Calendar import: one tap pulls birthdays, holidays and deadlines straight from the iOS Calendar
• Repeating countdowns that roll over automatically each year
• Count down in days, weeks or months, or let Auto pick the friendliest unit as the big day gets closer

Privacy 🔐

There is no account, no sign up and no ads. Your countdowns live in your own iCloud, not on our servers, and we do not sell anything about you. Each countdown has a Show in Search & Siri switch, so anything you would rather keep off a shared device stays out of Spotlight, and Siri will not read it out.

Featured by Apple 🍎

Apple has featured Emoji Countdown on the App Store several times, including in 12 countries in 3 categories right now.

It is especially popular in Japan 🇯🇵, which is its biggest market by active users.

About Lewis 👨‍💻

Emoji Countdown is made by Lewis Smith, a full time indie developer based in the UK, who has been building iPhone apps since 2012. He went full time indie in 2017 and looks after development, design and marketing himself. Holly handles customer support, also from the UK.

Alongside Emoji Countdown, Lewis makes World Time Widget, a world clock for the people in your life, which launched with iOS 8, has passed a million downloads and has been featured by Apple several times, and Progress, a body measurement tracker that has been on the App Store since 2012.

You can find more at lewis42.me and on LinkedIn.