About

What Oscillo is

Oscillo is an independent iPhone app that turns the phone in your pocket into a timegrapher and precision log for mechanical watches. It is made in Berlin.

The idea is simple: a timegrapher is fundamentally a microphone and some signal processing, and a modern iPhone already has both. Oscillo listens to the faint tick and tock of a watch movement through the microphone and computes the same readings a watchmaker reads on a bench — without any external hardware.

How it measures

When you hold a watch to the microphone, a digital signal processing (DSP) core isolates the escapement's impulses from background sound and measures the precise interval between them. From those intervals it derives rate (seconds per day), beat error (milliseconds), and amplitude (degrees of balance-wheel swing), and plots each beat on a live timing diagram. Because the impulses are very quiet, readings are most reliable in a quiet room with the watch resting against the phone. The Learn guide explains each reading, and the FAQ covers how a bench snapshot relates to real-world wrist accuracy.

Beyond the bench, the Precision Log tracks how a watch actually performs as you wear it: you record the time it shows over days, and Oscillo computes the observed rate across the whole cycle — capturing positional changes, temperature, and power reserve that a single reading cannot.

Who it is for

Oscillo is built for watch enthusiasts and collectors who care about what is inside their watches — people who want to check a new acquisition, confirm a service, track a movement over time, or simply understand how their watches keep time. It is not a replacement for a professional service, but it puts a genuinely useful diagnostic in everyone's pocket.

The facts