Days Strong
An app for the habits you have stopped and the ones you have started, built so that nothing you put into it ever leaves your phone.
It holds some genuinely private things, so I built it with nowhere to send them. There is no account to make and no server to trust, which is a harder way to build an app and the only honest way to make that promise.
- What I did
- Product · Design · Build · Launch · Running it live
- What it is
- iPhone and iPad app · Android app · Everything on the device · Marketing site
- Who it is for
- Software product, nothing to something
- Status
- Live
Published on
Days Strong
One app, on a phone and a tablet, with nothing syncing between them by design.
The problem
Every app for this wants an account first.
The things people most want to stop doing are the things they least want to type into somebody else’s database.
Look at what is already out there and the pattern is the same almost every time. Make an account. Agree to the terms. Pick a plan. Then, once you have handed over an email address and whatever else, you get to tell it the thing you are embarrassed about.
That is backwards. It is also why a lot of people start one of these in January and have deleted it by February. The app asked for trust before it had done anything to earn it.
What I built
A counter that says the thing out loud.
The name is the interface. You open it and it tells you how many days you are into something, and that sentence is the whole point of the app. Forty seven days strong. It handles the habits you have quit and the habits you are trying to start, which are two different jobs that most apps treat as one.
It also tracks sleep, because for a lot of people that turned out to be the thing underneath the other things rather than a separate problem to solve.
The part I am most pleased with is the wall. A year of a habit shown as a grid you can see in one go, where a bad week is obviously a bad week and not a dip in a chart you have to interpret. You can tell how you are doing without reading anything.
What it does
- Habits you have stopped, counted in days
- Habits you are starting, counted the same way
- A year at a time, as a wall you can read at a glance
- Sleep, alongside the rest rather than in its own app
- Widgets, so the count is on the home screen
- A backup into your own iCloud, not mine
- No account, no sign-up, no email address
- On iPhone, iPad and Android
The decision that shaped it
Nothing leaves the phone, and that is the product.
Everything you put in stays on your device. There is no login because there is nothing to log in to. If you want it backed up it goes into your own iCloud, which is yours, not an account of mine with your private business sitting in it.
That decision cost me things. Syncing across devices is harder. Knowing what people actually use is almost impossible, so I am guessing where most people would have a dashboard. I would make the same call again, because the promise only means something if the app is built so that I could not break it even if I wanted to.
It is free to use, and there is a one-off payment to lift the limits. No subscription. An app you only open for ten seconds a day should not bill you every month for the privilege.
Where it is
Live, on both stores.
It is out and anyone can download it. Android came later than iPhone and was never in the original plan, which was a straight change of mind on my part rather than a roadmap being followed.
I use it myself, every day, which is the only reason it has kept getting better. The things that annoy me about it get fixed, because nobody has to report them to me first.
Want something like this
If the Days Strong story sounds like your business, tell me about it.
No pitch and no obligation. Tell me what you’re running on now and what’s going wrong with it, and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth doing.