Read-o-Clock: Clock Reading

Muntasim Ul Haque

About this app

Read-o-Clock is one real wall clock on the screen, and nothing else. It opens on the real local time and keeps it, with a second hand that ticks the way a quartz wall clock ticks: one step a second, with the small overshoot and settle a real hand makes.

Teaching time by hand

Move the long hand or the short hand with a finger. The other hand follows the way real gears make it follow: move the minute hand and the hour hand creeps forward with it, move the hour hand and the minute hand winds around with it. The clock keeps running while you talk about it. Let go near a whole minute and the hands settle onto it, so one o'clock can be exactly one o'clock, with the second hand on its twelve.


A real clock, not a toy

The hour hand sits exactly halfway between two numbers at half past, because that is where a real hour hand sits. There is no digital readout, no quiz screen, no score and no menu: just the clock, the way it hangs on the wall.

Made for small hands

Anywhere on the dial picks up the nearest hand, and the touch targets are huge. Nothing needs reading. Close the app and open it again and the clock is back on the real time, so the next lesson starts clean.

A note for parents

Children learn to read a clock by moving the hands themselves. Sit together, set the clock to breakfast time, then to bath time, and let your child move the hands back and forth. The clock is the whole lesson; there is nothing else to tap.

Private by construction

No ads, no trackers, no analytics, no accounts. The app asks for no permissions at all, not even internet, so it is incapable of sending anything anywhere. Nothing is stored on the device, and nothing is collected, because there is nothing to collect.

Open source, paid once

Read-o-Clock is open source under the MIT license. Pay once and use it forever: no purchases, no subscriptions, no upsell, no ads. If you cannot afford the payment, write me an email.

What’s new

The store banner now keeps the clock and its name inside Play's cutoff zones, so the graphic no longer comes back cut. Still one clock on one screen: no menu, no permissions, no network, no ads.