I just shipped a small exam-countdown app for Android called ExamDay. The category ("D-day" apps, as they're called in Korea) is old and crowded, so before writing the listing I pulled the public reviews of the five most-installed countdown apps on Google Play and read everything rated 1–3★.
This is about the category, not my app. If you're building anything with a home-screen widget, the middle section is the part to read.
What I looked at
| App | Installs | Rating | Text reviews | 1–3★ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TheDayBefore | 10M+ | 4.58 (112k) | 4,222 | 459 |
| Countdown Widget | 10M+ | 4.16 (135k) | 3,122 | 998 |
| Time Until | 5M+ | 4.55 (50k) | 3,017 | 615 |
| Days To | 1M+ | 4.66 (28k) | 3,002 | 771 |
| Days counter | 1M+ | 4.61 (7k) | 498 | 54 |
Method: google-play-scraper (Python), en + ko, newest first, up to 3,000 per language per app. Play only returns reviews that have text. 2,897 reviews rated 1–3★, keyword-bucketed, sorted by count and by "helpful" votes.
The complaints, ranked
| # | Complaint | Reviews | 👍 helpful votes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Too many ads | 858 | 1,451 |
| 2 | Widget (paywalled, doesn't refresh, wrong size) | 541 | 1,016 |
| 3 | Paywall / subscription | 448 | 1,105 |
| 4 | Got worse after an update | 187 | 540 |
| 5 | Too complicated for a countdown | 190 | 211 |
| 6 | Notifications forced | 95 | 208 |
| 7 | Status bar / lock screen | 43 | 58 |
(A "date calculation" bucket also scored high, but it's mostly the word "count" matching — I only quote reviews I read.)
Buckets 1, 3 and 4 are largely the same story told three ways.
The one-time purchase that became $15 a week
Countdown Widget has the lowest rating in the set (4.16) and the most 1★ reviews (841). Almost all of the upvoted ones say this (70, 62, 51, 47, 38, 33 👍):
"I previously paid to unlock the premium features as it used to be a one time payment. Now I've lost what I've had all this time, am slammed with ads non-stop, and to get the premium version back, I have to pay $14.99 a week?!?"
"THEY'RE TRYING TO SIGN PEOPLE UP FOR $780/YEAR!!! …for a simple timer."
"ridiculous amount of ads. edit for dev: of course the paid version doesn't have ads. it's also 18 dollars a week. for a countdown."
Whatever you think about pricing, the mechanics are instructive: users who had paid were moved to the free tier, and the free tier got heavier ads at the same time. That's where the 👍 comes from — not the price, the reversal.
Widgets: the whole point, and the thing that breaks
Days To (47, 32, 27 👍):
"I downloaded this app to set up a widget, only to find that having a widget is a 'premium' feature. I'd say the widget aspect is pretty integral to having a countdown on your phone."
"It's a lovely app with beautiful background options… My only complaint is it doesn't have widgets."
Time Until (43, 32 👍):
"I paid for this. What happened to the widget? It's useless now. The whole point of the countdown is to be able to see the countdown. The widget does not refresh anymore. You got to open and 'apply' each time."
"Homescreen widget 'literally never' loads or works anymore… It's been broken for like a year or more"
And the most-upvoted review in the whole dataset (89 👍), also Time Until: the widget doesn't honour the display options, custom image placement, or scale its text when the widget is enlarged.
Nobody is asking for much. They want the number on the home screen, updated at midnight, in the size they chose.
Ads, specifically
TheDayBefore (79 👍): "the app itself seems great, but I just can't stand the ads, they pop up way too often and you have to actually watch it for 20+ seconds to close it." Time Until (37 👍): "every three taps, I get another ad… My phone is set to mute. The full screen ads when opening completely ignored that." Days To (21 👍): "Creating a countdown takes 3 or 4 steps, and there is an advertisement after each."
Small things people cared about
- Can't create a countdown without a reminder (Time Until, 24 👍).
- Full-screen view is partially hidden under the status bar; long event names break mid-word (24 👍).
- Wants a recurring daily countdown ("time until wake up, 6 am every day") (25 👍).
- Korean review: D-17 works but D+17 (days since) doesn't (4 👍).
What I took from this
- Don't paywall the widget. In a countdown app it isn't a premium feature, it's the product. Three of the five apps got their worst reviews for exactly this.
- Never move paying users down. The reversal is what people upvote.
- Ads in a countdown app have almost no surface to hide behind — the app is opened for three seconds. A full-screen ad is 100% of the session.
- The widget must update by itself at midnight and survive reboots; "open the app and press apply" is a bug, not a workaround.
What ExamDay does about it (and what it doesn't)
Only things you can check in the app or listing:
- Widgets are free and built in — a single-exam widget and a multi-exam widget (grid or list), both configurable from the home screen. No premium tier exists; there is no billing code in the app.
-
Ads: one banner in a reserved slot plus a dismissible native card at start and on exit.
InterstitialAd,AppOpenAd,RewardedAd: zero occurrences. The banner is folded away on onboarding, the notification explainer and the full-screen view. - No login, no server of ours. Backup is a single file you export and import yourself.
-
Reminders are opt-in (D-30/7/3/1/day, with a "Not now" on the explainer) and scheduled with
setExactAndAllowWhileIdle. - The day count is computed from midnight to midnight and rounded, so the 23- and 25-hour DST days don't shift it by one (unit-tested — the #1 app in this list has an old review about exactly that bug).
- 21 exam presets, photo backgrounds (5 built-in or your gallery), full-screen view, study timer, stats, spaced-repetition review reminders (1/3/7/15 days).
What it doesn't have yet: sharing a countdown as an image, recurring countdowns, calendar import, and a persistent status-bar countdown — all things people asked for above. It shipped this week, so I can't yet tell you how reliably the widget refreshes on every launcher; if it doesn't on yours, tell me.
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eltacrew.examday
Data collected 2026-09-12 with google-play-scraper. Quotes are verbatim from public Google Play reviews; Korean ones are my translation. I'm the developer of ExamDay; competitor names identify the public listings analysed.
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