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Fantastic post. As a mechanical watch collector / enthusiast, I enjoyed reading this. When you say "phone mic" do you mean the embedded one, or an external one?
I've tried these as apps before, and they never worked that well unfortunately. Perhaps the ticks aren't loud enough, or phone mics aren't that great, or background noise gets picked up as ticks, who knows. I bought and use the item linked below. It's big, and feels like tech straight out of the cold war era, but works great. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0081SSJZG
I will say, this flow is not the primary concept for the app. My intended design, and what it's been for 2+ years, is a tool that provides structured flows for inputting the time on your device and comparing it to atomic time (provided in my app). If you stagger these measurements over 6 or so hours for a day or two, you get a very precise reading and I still recommend this approach as being better.
Neat, but I wish this wasn't a phone app (and Apple exclusive at that). My computer already has a high quality microphone that I assume would be more suitable for this purpose.
It's in open beta testing on the Play Store for Android. You can also find low cost external mics for your devices that work well.
This is a fascinating read but what do you do with this information? Is there a threshold at which you need to take the watch apart and fix something or is this just useful info to know about your watch?
Higher end watches also get external certifications that reflect different precision standards. Some examples: METAS, COSC, or Rolex Superlative Chronometer if you are Rolex and need to be special. They have different specs, Superlative Chronometer is +/-2 sec per day. If it's out of spec and you're under warranty, you may be entitled to a free adjustment by a service center. Otherwise, overtime, as the performance degrades, it's a signal you may need a service.
There's also the risk of magnetization. If the delicate machinery becomes magnetized, you'll see BIG swings, like +/- minutes per day. Demagnitization is something any watchmaker can do quickly. (There is inherently some risk posed by the phone itself having a lot of magnets, but modern watches are typically built to resist magnetization to varying degrees -- look at the Rolex Milgauss as an example of best-effort magnet resistance)
Watches will also perform variably depending on position. If you know your watch is -4sec/day on your wrist, but +6sec/day face down, you can effectively manage it's accuracy by placing it face down over night and never have to unscrew the crown but keep a true time. This is a very common use case.
Hope that covers the general cases. This app avoids a lot of even deeper complexity, like beat error and amplitude which are deeper metrics describing the movements performance and guide watchmakers to know which screws to adjust which way.
Neat, but I wish this wasn't a phone app (and Apple exclusive at that). My computer already has a high quality microphone that I assume would be more suitable for this purpose.
Seems some people have done this already with a PC app: https://timeandtidewatches.com/how-to-make-your-own-timegrap...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Practically speaking, unless you only own a single mechanical watch you really only care about the per day loss.
You know what they say. Man with one clock, always knows what time it is. Man with two clocks, never quite sure...
Not sure how stable the waveform is across ticks in a mechanical watch though.