Guys, learn to code. You never know where it might take you. Today you’re learning Swift; four years later, you’re charging people through Apple’s in-app purchase system because they forgot how old they are.

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There are apps that solve genuinely complicated problems, and then there’s What’s My Age Again Widgets, an iPhone app built around a problem that most of us could technically solve in about three seconds.

How old am I?

Yes, really.

You could subtract your birth year from the current year. You could ask Siri. You could open a calculator. You could even, in a moment of desperation, ask Google.

Or you could install an entire app whose primary job is to make sure you never forget your age again.

And honestly? The ridiculousness is part of the charm.

What’s My Age Again Widgets is a free iPhone and iPad utility from developer Josh Holtz. Rather than trying to turn age calculation into some elaborate productivity system, the app takes a much simpler approach: enter your birthday once, then put your age somewhere you can see it. The main selling point is its widget, which can display your age directly on your Home Screen or in the widget area.

That sounds almost too obvious. And that’s exactly why it works.

The app’s description essentially admits that people can be surprisingly bad at remembering ages — not just their own, but those of the people around them. There’s a second widget designed for keeping track of other people’s ages, including children, parents, grandparents and significant others. For younger children, it can go beyond simply displaying a number and show their age in weeks and months.

Suddenly, the joke starts making a little more sense.

Think about how often someone asks, “How old is your kid now?” If you’re a parent, you probably know the answer immediately. But ask about a cousin, niece, nephew, grandparent or even yourself on a random Tuesday and suddenly your brain starts doing calendar arithmetic.

And birthdays are particularly good at exposing this.

Someone turns 29, and for the next few months you confidently remember they’re 29. Then enough time passes, someone asks their age, and you have absolutely no idea whether they’re 29, 30 or somehow still 28.

This app simply removes the mental calculation from the equation.

It also takes advantage of one of the iPhone’s most useful features: widgets. Instead of opening an app whenever you need the information, the app can keep the answer sitting on your Home Screen. The developer also lets users customize the widget’s background and text color, while the widget for other people can optionally display their birthday as well.

That is the clever bit.

The app itself is almost unnecessary. The widget is the product.

You don’t really need to “use” What’s My Age Again Widgets in the traditional sense. Once it has your birthday, you can essentially forget that the app exists. It just quietly does its one job in the background of your phone experience.

And that makes the app feel less like an age calculator and more like a tiny piece of permanent information attached to your Home Screen.

The developer has also found a surprisingly playful way to make money from something this simple.

The app is free to download, but the App Store listing includes a collection of optional in-app purchases that are framed as tips. In the U.S. storefront, those include a $1.99 “Small Tip,” $3.99 “Medium Tip,” $5.99 “Large Tip,” along with recurring options such as a $0.99 monthly tip, $0.99 weekly tip and $9.99 yearly tip. There are also “Tipscription” options.

That wording is what makes the whole thing particularly funny.

It’s not pretending that you need to subscribe to remember your own birthday. It’s not putting “PRO” next to a feature that calculates the difference between two dates. Instead, the developer essentially says: here’s the app, here’s what it does, and if you like it enough to support it, you can leave a tip.

The recurring “tipscription” model is an especially interesting twist because it borrows the mechanics of a subscription without presenting the app like a conventional subscription service.

That’s a pretty clever move for a tiny independent utility.

The App Store history shows that this monetization approach evolved over time. Version 1.1.1, released in August 2023, introduced monthly “tipscriptions,” while version 1.1.2 added what the developer described as a “prettier paywall.” The latest listed version, 1.2.0, arrived in December 2024 with a name update and minor fixes.

The app has also picked up the kind of reviews you’d expect from something that solves a very specific, very human problem.

One U.S. reviewer joked that they had previously told someone how old they “thought” they were and now had a way to avoid that embarrassment. Another said the app meant they no longer had to ask their wife how old they were. A separate review specifically recommended leaving a tip to support the developer.

And that’s probably the best argument for why this silly little app exists in the first place.

Good utility software doesn’t always need to be complicated.

There’s a tendency in the modern app world to keep adding features. A simple idea becomes a dashboard, then a social platform, then an AI assistant, then a subscription service with twelve tabs you never asked for.

What’s My Age Again Widgets goes in the opposite direction.

It takes one tiny annoyance — forgetting someone’s age — and removes it.

That’s it.

There’s even something oddly satisfying about the fact that the app doesn’t try to convince you that calculating your age is an important life-management activity. It knows the premise is a little ridiculous. The name itself, What’s My Age Again, sounds like someone realizing mid-conversation that they’ve completely lost track of their own birthday math.

But underneath the joke is a genuinely useful idea: information you need occasionally is often more useful when it’s visible all the time.

The app can also automatically acknowledge your birthday, with a previous update adding the ability for the widget to wish you a happy birthday when the day arrives.

So yes, you can absolutely calculate your age without this app.

You can do it in your head. You can use a calculator. You can ask your phone. You can look at your driver’s license.

But none of those options put your age on your iPhone’s Home Screen every day.

And that is the oddly brilliant part of What’s My Age Again Widgets. It doesn’t win because age calculation is difficult. It wins because it turns an otherwise forgettable calculation into a piece of glanceable information — and then wraps the whole thing in a playful monetization model that lets users voluntarily pay for something they absolutely don’t need.

The result is a utility app that is almost comically specific, surprisingly practical and, from a business perspective, much smarter than it has any right to be.

Sometimes you don’t need to invent the next big app.

Sometimes you just need to look at something everyone occasionally forgets and say, “You know what? I’ll put that on the Home Screen.”