The best habit apps are the ones that motivate you, day in and day out, to keep pursuing your goals. But while the research on daily habits is pretty clear—consistency is key and tracking progress is powerful—the type of app you go for will depend on your personal preference. Just like your choice between Android and iPhone. For this list, we’re on team Android. But worry not iPhone users, your time is coming soon.
In our list of the best habit apps for Android, we’ve included everything from the super stripped-back and simple, to feature-laden apps with colorful pie-charts. There are even some game-style apps if you really want to keep it fun.
The Best Habit Apps for Android Users in 2018
Below are our top picks for habit-tracking apps available for Android. Because Android users need to build and break habits too and sometimes, you get pushed aside. Not today.
1. Grow
Is less more? It can be. And Grow is one of those apps that proves it.
Grow is simple in both design and functionality, with a stripped-back interface and a green design scheme that bucks the corporate trend and takes its inspiration from plants. There’s something subtly neat about that: It’s a calming reminder that habits, like trees, take time and patience to grow.
Price: Free
2. Loop
Are you a data nerd? If you love your apps with colorful graphs and statistics, Loop might be for you.
Ad-free and open source, Loop is one of the best habit apps for tracking your progress in a more comprehensive way. It tracks the strength of your habits as well as streaks (missed days make habits weaker; streaks make them stronger) and lets you go back over the history of your habits. So you can pat yourself on the back for how far you’ve come.
Price: Free
3. HabitHub
Don’t break the chain, says HabitHub, if you want to build a solid habit. In addition to tracking habit streaks, it also offers a reward method to keep you motivated.
HabitHub has all the bells and whistles you might want from a habit-tracking app, and even though the free version is limited, it still lets you track a decent number of habits (up to five) and gives you plenty of graphs and charts to satisfy your data desires.
Price: Free; premium features for $0.99–$5.99 per item
4. Fabulous: Motivate Me!
Fabulous is an app for personal growth where the goal “isn’t to reach a state of constant happiness.” Rather, says Fabulous, it’s becoming better versions of ourselves through confronting challenging situations.
Fabulous makes our list of best habit apps because it’s uniquely based on psychology and behavioral economics. Rather than leave you to your own devices, the app helps you develop rituals that are specifically designed to foster traits like compassion, self-discipline, and mental fitness.
One of the things we love about Fabulous is that it provides detailed explanations of why particular actions and steps are important. And it focuses on building a better life through small, sustainable steps.
Price: Free with in-app upgrades for $4.99–$99.99 per item
5. Habitica
Gamers rejoice: Habitica lets you gamify your habit-building in a seriously addictive way. Create a character, team up with other members to fight monsters and go on quests, and use the “gold” you earn from checking off tasks to purchase in-game rewards.
Habitica is fun and easy to use. So even if you’re not the type to spend your Saturday night on a mission in Call Of Duty, don’t worry—you can still find your way around Habitica and enjoy its game-style interface.
Price: Free with in-app upgrades for $0.99–$47.99 per item
6. HabitBull
HabitBull is one of the more powerful habit apps out there, though arguably has more features than you actually need. (It includes things like motivational quotes and discussion forums). Still, HabitBull allows plenty of flexibility in setting goals with options for multiple times per day, week, month, and on specific days of the week. It’s also a good one for cutting out bad habits as well as creating good ones.
HabitBull’s free version lets you set up to five goals, while the premium version offers 100 along with additional features like cloud backup and export to CSV.
Price: Free with in-app upgrades for $3.99–$62.67 per item
7. HabitShare
HabitShare works much like many others on this list, but its unique selling point is social integration. Because knowing that your workmates are going to see whether you’ve been for your daily run or not might just be the extra motivation you need to lace up those sneakers.
You don’t have to share all your habits with the world. With HabitShare, you can choose who sees each habit or even keep them private if you prefer. As well as having your friends keep you accountable, you can also cheer them on with fun gifs (because who isn’t motivated by a gif?)
Price: Free
8. Goal Tracker & Habit List
Many of our best habit apps are designed around the idea of streaks—days in a row that you manage to tick off a task. But this is the one that’s most directly inspired by Jerry Seinfeld’s “Productivity Secret,” which basically involves putting huge crosses or ticks on a wall calendar so you can see your progress at a glance.
Goal Tracker & Habit List gives you a digital version of that calendar in either a weekly or monthly format.
Another thing we love? It’s totally free, with no ads or in-app purchases.
Price: Free
9. Goal Meter
Goal Meter looks more like a beautifully-illustrated children’s book than a goal-tracking app. And that’s the coolest thing about it. While other apps can look a bit generic, Goal Meter wins you over with its totally unique and quirky interface.
Goal Meter lets you organize your goals and tasks by category and has dozens of ready-made templates you can pick from for things like quitting smoking, paying off debts, losing weight, and studying.
Price: Free with in-app upgrades for $4.49 per item
10. Repeat
Some apps win for their fancy features, others for sheer simplicity. Repeat is one of the latter. It’s easy to use and elegantly simple in design, with little more than the core functionality you’d need to set and track your goals and habits.
All you need to do is create some habits, add your own reason for doing them, and set how many times the habit should be repeated. Repeat does the rest. Bonus? It’s free and without ads.
Price: Free; upgrade for $0.99
11. My Effectiveness
This colorful app was inspired by Stephen R. Covey’s famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and as such, bills itself as a framework rather than a task list. Habits aren’t tracked in isolation, but instead, form part of a broader mission you want to achieve in life.
My Effectiveness also prompts you to view your life from different angles by defining the “roles” you play and then setting goals for each of those roles. It also includes an inbuilt Workodoro timer so you can smash through your daily habit goals using the Pomodoro Technique (i.e, breaking work into 25-minute blocks).
Price: Free with ads
For a paper-based alternative: Panda Planner
Some people prefer the good ol’ pen-and-paper method for recording and tracking their habits and goals. And it’s a perfectly valid one: Research from Dominican University even showed that writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them.
So if you enjoy the act of sitting down in front of a beautiful blank page and watching it fill up with goals, committed in ink, try a scientifically-designed tool like Panda Planner. With habit-tracking built into their layout, you’re choosing and tracking that goal—every day. Bucking the tech trend once in a while can also be surprisingly satisfying.
Your turn: Have you tried any habit-tracking apps? Let us know your favorites in the comments.
Need more apps? Here are 75 options that can change your happiness, productivity, time-management, and more.
