Why habit apps stop working after two weeks

Two weeks in, the app is still there and you are not

Everyone has a graveyard of habit apps. The pattern is the same: a good week, a decent second week, a missed day, and then the icon sits on the third home screen forever. We do not think the problem is you. We think most habit apps are built around the two things that are easiest to build, and neither of them is what makes a habit.

What a habit actually is

In the habit research, a habit is a behaviour that has become automatic in response to a context: the same cue, the same action, until the action fires without deliberation. Benjamin Gardner, Phillippa Lally and Jane Wardle put the advice in one line in the British Journal of General Practice: repeat a chosen behaviour in the same context until it becomes automatic and effortless.² The context is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A habit is not a streak on a calendar. It is a link between a situation and an action.

It also takes longer than the app's onboarding suggests. In Lally's 84-day study, the average time to reach the plateau of automaticity was 66 days, with a range from 18 days to a predicted 254.¹ Most apps are designed around a 21 or 30 day challenge. By the time the habit would have formed, the challenge is over and the notifications have been muted.

Reminders and tracking are not the same as habits

Katarzyna Stawarz, Anna Cox and Ann Blandford reviewed the functionality of 115 habit formation apps and ran a four-week study on how different kinds of cues and positive reinforcement affect habit formation. The title of their paper is the finding: apps need to go beyond self-tracking and reminders if they are going to support habit formation rather than just measure it.³ A reminder gets you to do the thing today. Tracking tells you that you did. Neither one attaches the action to the moment in your day where it should live, and neither one makes doing it feel like anything.

Missing a day is not what kills it

This is the part we most want people to hear. In the same Lally study, missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process.¹ A single skipped day is noise. What the apps do with a skipped day is another matter: a broken streak, a reset counter, a sad icon. The design turns a harmless miss into a reason to quit, and then people quit.

What does help, according to the research

• Attach the action to a context, not a time. After the coffee, when the meeting ends, when you park the car. The context is the cue.²
• Make the action pay off immediately. Immediate rewards predict persistence at long-term goals better than the delayed rewards the goal is for.⁴ Something has to happen when you do the thing.
• Treat a missed day as a missed day. Not a failure, not a reset. Do it next time.¹
• Plan for the boring middle. The automaticity curve rises fastest early and flattens for weeks before it plateaus.¹ Weeks three to eight are where novelty runs out and the habit is not yet automatic. That stretch needs a reason to keep tapping.

What we did about it

Touchward is deliberately not a tracker. There is a counter, because a number going up is satisfying, but nothing resets and nothing breaks. The reward is a buzz you chose, delivered the instant you tap, so the action pays off now rather than at the end of a chart. Reminders and calendar nudges are there to tie the tap to a context, the end of an event, a time you set, rather than to nag. And when the middle gets boring, Random builds a new look in one press, so the tap feels new before the habit is old.

None of that is magic. It is an attempt to build the part the research says matters, instead of the part that is easy to build.

Touchward is not a medical device and makes no health claims. This article is general information, not advice about your health. If you are working with a clinician, keep doing that.

Sources

1. Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6):998-1009, 2010.
2. Gardner B, Lally P, Wardle J. Making health habitual: the psychology of habit-formation and general practice. British Journal of General Practice 62(605):664-666, 2012.
3. Stawarz K, Cox AL, Blandford A. Beyond Self-Tracking and Reminders: Designing Smartphone Apps That Support Habit Formation. CHI 2015, pages 2653-2662.
4. Woolley K, Fishbach A. Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-Term Goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43(2):151-162, 2017.