Case study
Event Countdown
Count down to the moments that matter.
- 5.9M+
- Downloads on iOS
- ~1M
- Monthly active users
- 4.7★
- From 131k+ ratings
- 11 yrs
- On the App Store
Where it started
It started in a school, not a boardroom.
Root38 is Ben and Hugh. They met working in education — Ben managing IT, Hugh running school data systems after years teaching maths (yes, the √ in Root38 is his). Ben had been writing code since typing Space Invaders into a ZX Spectrum as a kid.
Their first app, Exam Countdown, launched in 2014 and did one simple thing well: help students count down to their exams. Schools took to it — it’s passed 1.45 million downloads, and a decade on you can still see the spikes every exam season.
But people wanted to count down to more than exams — holidays, birthdays, weddings, a baby’s due date. So Exam Countdown grew into Event Countdown.
Built to last
Eleven years. 25+ major releases. Still 4.7 stars.
Two senior developers build the whole thing — Ben on iOS and Swift, Hugh on Android and the backend. No outsourcing, no handoffs. That’s how an app stays genuinely good for a decade: the people who care about it are the people writing it.
Inside the app
Simple enough for anyone, with the depth people stay for.
Events list, home-screen widgets, live countdowns, dark mode and hundreds of custom icons.
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