ElanoryaDrink Buddy
It records the coffee too, and that is the point
A drinks app that only counts alcohol is a record of your drinking. One that counts everything is a record of your days. That sentence sounds like positioning and is actually a schema decision — it changes what the camera assumes, what the catalogue accepts, and what the statistics are allowed to rank.
The decision, stated plainly
Drink Buddy records what you are drinking, and it does not care whether that is a negroni or a glass of tap water. Both are check-ins. Both cost one of the day's five. Both appear in the feed, on the map, and in the statistics.
The product documentation calls this the single most consequential decision in the app, and it is careful to add that it is not a hedge. A hedge would be an alcohol app with a water button bolted on. This is the other thing: a schema in which the category is a field, alcohol is one of its values, and nothing in the code treats that value as the real one.
The four reasons on the record
These are the arguments the product actually made to itself, in the order it made them.
- Retention lives in the gap between two and fifteen.
- Someone who drinks alcohol twice a week has two chances a week to open a drinks app. The same person logging coffee, water and tea has roughly fifteen. No amount of feature work closes a gap that large.
- It removes the moral weight of the record.
- An app that stores only alcohol becomes a record of your drinking, and people are reasonably wary of keeping one. An app that stores everything becomes a record of your days, which is a different object with a different feeling attached to it.
- It keeps the friend who does not drink in the group.
- In a friends-only product, one person with an empty profile is a social problem, not an edge case. Breadth means their profile is as full as anyone's.
- It matches what an evening actually looks like.
- One birthday dinner produces a cocktail, a wine, a water and a coffee. A product that can only represent one of those four is not recording the evening.
What the decision forces on each surface
This is the part that makes it architecture rather than positioning. Each row is a constraint the rest of the product has to satisfy.
| Surface | What it is required to do |
|---|---|
| Capture | Never assume alcohol, never default to a beer category, never open by asking which venue you are in |
| Catalogue | Treat a glass of tap water as a complete, valid, non-degraded entry with no reduced path |
| Statistics | Aggregate across all drink types by default; alcohol is a filter the reader chooses, never the frame |
| Rankings | Rank across all drink types — a ranking of who drank the most alcohol is a safety hazard, not a feature |
| Games | Reward nothing about volume, speed or competition in drinking |
| Copy and icons | Speak in terms of a drink rather than a pint |
Where the single-category assumption catches people out
Most confusion here comes from importing expectations built by every other app in the category.
Waiting for the weekend to open the app, and losing the habit before it forms.
The morning coffee is a check-in of exactly the same kind. The product is designed around that being ordinary rather than a novelty.
Logging only the alcoholic drinks of an evening and ending up with a distorted record.
Four drinks are four entries. Skipping the water because it feels unworthy produces a history that reads as heavier than the evening was.
Expecting a hydration target, a caffeine limit or a nutrition breakdown to appear later.
None of those are planned. They convert a social product into a health claim, and the documentation names that as a boundary rather than a backlog item.
What this page does not settle
Stated so you do not read an answer into silence.
- Whether logging water counts toward the same five-per-day allowance as anything else. It does, and the reasoning for that ceiling is a separate page.
- How the app decides which drink you are holding. Nothing analyses your photograph; the selection mechanism has its own page.
- Which statistics are computed from the breadth, and which are refused outright.
- Where to download the app. It has not been submitted to any store, so there is nothing to link to and nothing is implied about when there will be.
Questions
Is the water and coffee support a later addition to an alcohol app?
No. The catalogue is category-generic at the schema level: nine categories, twenty-five generic drinks, with the non-alcoholic ones ordered first in the database itself. There is no separate path or reduced treatment for them.
Does logging non-alcoholic drinks make the app suitable for under-18s?
No. The age gate is 18+ worldwide and enforced on the server. Breadth changes what the app is useful for, not who it is for, and the store rating is 18+ either way.
Can I use it as a hydration tracker?
You can log water, but it is not built as one. There is one allowance of five check-ins a day for every drink, with no separate non-alcoholic budget and no quick log without photographs — so a day of eight glasses does not fit. The documentation describes the product as a log of occasions rather than of every beverage consumed.
Will it eventually push me toward logging alcohol?
The refusals are placed in the surfaces rather than in a tone guide: capture never defaults to a beer category, statistics never frame alcohol as the default view, and no ranking compares alcohol volume between people.