Here's an app that tracks how much you're spending on bubble tea, you boba addicts

If you’re a longtime member of the Subtle Asian Traits Facebook group, you’d know that the group's collective affection for bubble tea is serious. Dead serious. 

So serious, in fact, that a few bubble tea fans (or addicts, depending on your view) actually produced a program that can keep track of one’s consumption of the hyper-sweet beverage and the chewy edibles bouncing in the bottom. 

California-based college student Ryan Yang and a couple of friends got together to create a web app called Boba Watch, and it does exactly that: keeping an eye on how much you’re spending on bubble tea. 

On a technical aspect, it’s a one-trick pony. The only purpose of the app is to track your expenditure on bubble tea, with the ability to set soft limits on how much you’re allowed to spend each month. 

It’s pretty manual too — users have to key in the brand, type of drink, and price by themselves. 

I suppose it’s pretty useful for those who really can’t kick the habit of having a pint of bubble tea every few hours. There’s even a chart depicting the data of your bubble tea purchases, so you can see which days and time slots you’re gulping them down. 

According to Yang, he and his buds were inspired to craft the app a few months ago after seeing other members in the Subtle Asian Traits page posting their bubble tea purchasing data on spreadsheets. Staying true to their Asian, analytics-driven roots, they did something about it.

“We decided to make a program for this community that helps keep track of your finances in a simpler fashion,” wrote Yang. “Boba Watch is an app you can open in a browser that keeps track of your boba consumption with the help of informative statistics and graphs, all encompassed in a beautiful UI.” 

Though they’ve spent several months working on the app, Yang insists that they’re not planning to profit from the endeavour at all. It’s just something that they made for group members and fellow bubble tea addicts, he wrote. 

“We hope you check it out since we literally spent countless hours over several months making this, which probably makes this the highest effort meme in this group. I mean, it literally does nothing else except record your drink consumption.”

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Talk about maximum effort for an inside joke. Yang is considering to include other features and metrics into the app sometime in the future, if there are enough requests. For the love that all that is saccharine, let’s hope that he doesn’t decide to automate the calorie-entry process because, son, we’re better off not knowing just how unhealthy bubble tea is. 

ilyas@asiaone.com