Who makes this, and why it exists.
Countrol is made by Tristan, a developer in Switzerland. One person writes the iOS app, the Android app, this website and every article on the blog — which is worth saying plainly, because health content on the internet rarely tells you who is behind it.
It started with a simple, uncomfortable observation: almost nobody can say how much they drank last month. Not because they are hiding it, but because a Tuesday three weeks ago is not a memory. Every honest attempt to cut down runs into the same wall — you cannot change a number you do not have.
Most of the apps in this space answer that with a quit date, a community feed and a streak that goes to zero the first time you slip. That works for some people. For everybody else it turns one bad evening into a reason to delete the app. Countrol counts instead. One tap, no judgement, and three numbers rather than one, so a single day never erases two months of them.
I am a developer, not a doctor. I have no medical training and Countrol is not a medical device. What I can do is read the published guidance carefully, cite it, and refuse to write anything past it — which is what the editorial policy commits this site to.
The health timelines in the app and in the articles come from the WHO, the NHS, the CDC, the NIAAA, the FDA and the American Cancer Society. Where an article makes a claim about a body, the source is listed at the bottom of it. Where the evidence is thin, the article says so rather than rounding it up into a promise.
Everything you log stays on your phone. There is no account, no sign-up, no server holding your consumption log and nothing to sell, because there is no database of it to sell from. If you switch on sync, entries go to your own iCloud, not to me. The privacy policy spells out the whole thing, including the anonymous usage statistics you can switch off in Settings.
The app is free to download and use. There is a paid tier, Countrol+, for themes, custom categories and extra icons — none of which gates the tracking, the streaks, the insights or the health timeline.
Bug reports, disagreements with something written here, or a source you think is wrong: support@countrol.app. Corrections get made and the review date on the article moves.
Countrol