Streaks and Little Streaks

My thanks to Crunchy Bagel — the company of developer Quentin Zervaas — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Streaks, their excellent app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form good habits. The point is to motivate you to tackle the things you want to do: anything from daily exercise goals, learning a new language, taking your vitamins, or quitting a bad habit. Anything. I’ve brushed my teeth daily since I was a child but I’ve never been good about flossing — until, generally, a few days before a scheduled dental cleaning. I’ve been using Streaks lately to groove a daily flossing habit. (I expect a pat on the back the next time I’m at the dentist.)

Streaks first sponsored DF back in 2016 and everything I wrote about it then remains true today. It’s a brilliant design, both visually and conceptually. I’ve tried a few apps like this over the years — including a few new ones in recent years — and what kills most of them is friction. If it takes too many fiddly steps to mark off the things you do, you stop using the app. Streaks makes it incredibly simple and fast to mark things done. For anything activity-related, you don’t have to do anything at all — it just tracks information from HealthKit (with your permission, of course) automatically. And in terms of the visual design, Streaks is both highly distinctive and very iOS-y — it doesn’t look like a stock iOS app, but it very much looks and feels like a good native iOS app. That’s a combination that takes a great eye to pull off. (Unsurprisingly, Streaks won an Apple Design Award a few years ago, and has often been featured by Apple in the App Store.)

iOS has not been standing still over the last 8 years and neither has Zervaas. Streaks supports all the latest stuff you’d hope for in an iOS app, including interactive widgets. Streaks’s interactive widgets reduce even further the friction of marking things done — interactive widgets were practically made for apps like Streaks. Streaks also has a great Apple Watch companion app.

I only accept sponsorships for products or services that I’m proud to support. But Streaks is so good that I want to go out of my way to draw attention to it (again). I’m not praising it with superlatives because it’s my sponsor; I’m doing so because it’s superlatively good. It’s a one-time purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions).

If you have any sort of interest in an app to help reinforce daily habits (or an interest in great UI design), go check Streaks out.

If you have young children, be sure to also try Little Streaks. It’s a great way to help kids focus on routines: meal time, bedtime, learning to ride a bike, brushing their teeth (and flossing!) — anything. Little Streaks is free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year of a subscription for unlimited routines.

★ Saturday, 30 November 2024