Widgets and Siri
The task you need, without opening anything
A reminder buried inside an app you have to remember to open is not really a reminder.
The whole problem with plant care is that it is invisible. Nothing tells you a plant is thirsty until it is drooping, and by then you have already learned the wrong lesson. Widgets fix that by putting the state of the house on a screen you already look at forty times a day, and Siri covers the other direction: telling the app you did something without stopping what you were doing.
How it works
A profile ring for the one you worry about
A small widget showing a single profile's counter, for the plant that keeps dying or the pet whose treatment you keep forgetting.
A digest of everything due
A medium widget with the day's tasks across the whole household, so you can see at a glance whether today needs anything.
A count on the Lock Screen
A Lock Screen accessory showing how many things are due, which is enough information to decide whether to open the app at all.
Siri and Shortcuts
Say it and it is logged: hey Siri, water the monstera. Built on App Intents, so it also works inside Shortcuts and automations.
The details that matter
Widgets read a snapshot, so they are fast and correct
Every change in the app writes a small snapshot file, around five kilobytes, into a shared app group, and widgets and intents read only that. It means the widget never waits on a sync and never shows a stale count after you tick something off.
Household-aware
The widget shows what the household needs, so a task your partner completed disappears from your Home Screen too, once it syncs.
Notifications stay grouped
Widgets are the passive surface and the daily digest is the active one. There is deliberately no per-plant notification stream, because forty plants would mean forty pings and you would turn them all off inside a week.
The honest limitation
There is no Apple Watch app and no iPad app. Kounts Care is iPhone only and requires iOS 26.
What this costs
A widget is available on the free tier. The full widget pack, including every size and the Lock Screen accessories, is part of Premium at $19.99 a year or $34.99 once. Siri Shortcuts work at every tier.
Questions, answered
Can I mark a plant watered from the widget?
Tapping a widget takes you into the app at the right place. For hands-free logging, Siri is the faster route: say water the monstera and it is recorded.
Is there an Apple Watch app?
Not as of version 1.0. Kounts Care is iPhone only.
Will the widget nag me?
It shows what is due and does not badge, escalate or turn red. Overdue items are shown in a muted coral rather than an alarm colour, on purpose.
What can I ask Siri?
Logging a care task by plant or pet name, which is the thing worth doing hands-free while your hands are wet. The intents are exposed to Shortcuts too, so you can build them into an automation.
Keep everything alive.
One calm app for the plants on your shelf and the animals on your sofa. Five profiles free, no account.
See also: Watering reminders · Seasonal watering · Large collections