The app that began with a cold

Underweather began the way most colds do — quietly, and at the worst possible time. A winter week at home, a head full of fog, and a cough that arrived a few days after I'd already started feeling off.

I'm a photographer by trade, so I spend my days noticing small changes in light and feeling. But laid up on the sofa that week, I couldn't have told you when the temperature started, or which day the cough turned from dry to something else. When I finally rang the practice, the questions were simple — how long, how bad, what have you taken — and I found I couldn't answer any of them properly.

So I did what most of us do. I started a note on my phone. It became a mess of half-sentences and times I'd guessed at after the fact. It didn't help much, and it certainly wasn't something I wanted to read back.

There wasn't a calm place for it

When I went looking for something better, the apps I found fell into two camps. Some were clinical dashboards — rows of numbers, charts, exports, built for tracking a chronic condition with great precision. Others were mood and wellness apps, lovely in their way, but not built for the plain business of being unwell for a week or two.

What I wanted was somewhere in between, and gentler than either: a quiet record kept by a person, for a person. Somewhere to note how a body actually moves through being under the weather — the slow start, the worst of it, the long tail of a cough — without being told what any of it meant, or what to take.

I didn't want a verdict. I wanted a record I'd still have later.

What it turned into

That idea didn't let go. Over a long stretch of evenings, it became Underweather: a place to note each day, keep track of what you've taken, and gather it all into a clear summary for a doctor or practitioner. Then it grew — ongoing things like hay fever and asthma across the seasons, a separate record for each person in a household, a history you can look back across year by year.

Some of what shaped it came straight from that first week. The voice stays calm on purpose. It never tells you what to take. And everything lives on your own device, because a record of how you and your family have felt is about as personal as it gets.

The name

"Under the weather" is one of those soft, old phrases that says a lot without fuss. It doesn't dramatise. It just acknowledges that you're not quite yourself, and that it will pass. That felt like the right spirit for the whole thing — an unhurried way through being unwell, rather than another app insisting you optimise something.

It's still made by one person, slowly, on long evenings. If any of this sounds like something you'd use — for yourself, or for the people you look after — I'd love for you to be among the first to try it.