Turn your iPhone into a mechanical-watch timegrapher.
Chronolyze listens to a mechanical watch through your iPhone's microphone and measures how well it's running: rate (seconds per day), beat error (milliseconds), amplitude (degrees), and it auto-detects the beat rate (bph). It also offers a guided positional test and a magnetization check — no bench equipment required.
Make sure it's a mechanical watch (it ticks several times per second). Press the case firmly against the bottom mic edge, move to a quieter room, and raise Detection sensitivity in Settings. A fully wound watch is louder and easier to detect.
No. Quartz watches tick once per second with a very different sound and aren't what a timegrapher measures. Chronolyze is for mechanical (hand-wound or automatic) movements.
Turn on Settings › Demo movement. The app generates a synthetic movement so you can explore every feature — measurement, positional test, and the trace — without a real watch.
Amplitude is estimated from the timing of the escapement's sub-sounds and depends on the lift angle you set and on clean audio. It's a best-effort figure — when the signal is unreliable the app shows a dash (—) or an approximate marker rather than a misleading number. Rate and beat error are the most robust measurements.
A watch runs at slightly different rates depending on its orientation. The Positional Test guides you through the six standard positions (dial up/down, crown up/down/left/right) and reports the spread (Δ) between the fastest and slowest — the figure a watchmaker regulates against.
A watch that suddenly runs minutes fast is often magnetized. The check uses your iPhone's magnetometer to detect a strong field near the watch. If it reports magnetization, a watchmaker's demagnetizer usually fixes it in seconds. (This feature needs a magnetometer, which some devices lack.)
Measuring works by resting the watch against the phone's microphone — a natural handheld gesture — and the magnetization check relies on a sensor many iPads don't have. The app runs on iPad in iPhone-compatibility mode.
Your audio is analyzed on-device and never recorded or sent anywhere; your saved watches and measurements stay on your device. The app uses Google Analytics for Firebase for anonymous, aggregate usage statistics only. See the Privacy Policy for details.