Washington native Coy Woolard, 31, is appealing to a niche audience, to say the least — an audience of coral enthusiasts.

In his spare time, Woolard, along with friends Marcus Smith and Ryan Poolos, designed an iPhone application, called Atoll, over the past year to identify different types of coral, as well as provide a coral library and a way for marine hobbyists to interact with one another.

The idea came from his childhood and Woolard’s growing fascination with anything aquatic over the years. He said he always loved to visit aquariums as a child and still loves to share this passion with his three children today.

“I think I surpassed their interest,” Woolard laughed. “It was always interesting and cool to go to different aquariums and stuff growing up.”

In his experience, it can be slow and time-consuming to try to interact with other enthusiasts via online forums or user groups, and Woolard said the app is meant to offer immediate responses to questions about corals or other species.

According to Woolard, he and his team members just launched the app Thursday, and have since garnered downloads from people all over the United States, Australia, Brazil and Sweden. As the app is meant to be a helpful tool for a specific audience, it remains free to download.

The app also uses an algorithm where a certain percentage of responses for one answer must be given before it is tagged as an answer, thus weeding out incorrect or misleading responses, he said.

By day, Woolard is a senior iOS (Apple Inc. operating system) engineer for BMW and now lives in Greenville, South Carolina. But his Washington roots run deep.

Woolard grew up in Beaufort County, attending Eastern Elementary School, P.S. Jones Middle School and finally graduating from Washington High School in 2003. His grandfather, Ben Woolard, ran a store in downtown Washington.

Before moving out of state, Woolard started a web development business in 2013 called Bitgraft with his friend, Jordan Floyd, serving eastern North Carolina.

“We still collaborate and talk and everything,” Woolard said.

He said he hopes this new venture with the app will continue to grow in information and number of downloads, and the creators have many ideas to make it better, including localization tactics to provide information in a user’s own language.

“We still have a backlog of ideas of things we want to add to it,” Woolard said.

The coral identification application Atoll is available in the Apple iOS App Store. For more information, visit http://atollapp.io.