App Review: Streaks

I've never been a big supporter of the New Years Resolution - I figure that if you want to make a change in your life, you shouldn't wait until the first of the year to do so. That being said, I think New Years is a good opportunity to take a minute and reflect on some of those goals you are currently working on.

This year I decided to look into a new application to help me track those everyday goals that I want to improve on and the iOS app Streaks is helping me do so.

I was looking for an application to track daily completion of items coupled with the option for reminders to do so. I was specifically looking for a way to get reminded to do these things without setting a specific time for the reminder. If you're anything like me, you start to learn that if your phone buzzes at 6 PM that it's time to drink some more water and after 2 weeks of this, you start to ignore the alert all together aside from the fact that you now know its 6 PM.

The app is limited to 12 total tasks (2 pages of 6) but I find this is more than enough. If you're trying to work on more than 12 things at a time I believe that you're bound to fail. You can also set up positive and negative behaviors as well - tracking if you did do your stretches today and if you've had junk food are both very easy examples of this.

Reminders

Streaks utilizes "Automatic Times" to set up reminders for you to avoid my previously mentioned issue. It's not as robust as it could be (I could use additional reminders per day) but it does a much better job than just a static reminder. Of course, if you want to have a static reminder, you can set those too.

The app is also very visually pleasing (very 2020) which is always a bit larger of a deciding factor for me with new apps than I care to admit. There are many themes and color combinations to suit almost anyone.

Side note: if you're looking for an application purely to remind you at random times throughout the day to Drink Water or Stand or Take a Break - Bzzt does exactly that and it works phenomenally (it just doesn't offer any tracking other than total times reminded)

Task Types

Did I mention that it also integrates into Apple Health so that you can set fitness goals outside of the Activity app? You can set all types of goals such as steps per day, Exercise Minutes, Stand Hours and so on which will all update automatically. I found this great to track if I have walked 10,000 steps per day with no additional interaction from myself.

Aside from Apple Health integration, you can set up timed tasks, binary tasks (Yes/No), and Negative tasks (things you do not want to do on a daily basis.).

Action URLs

You can set up an "Action URL" for each of your tasks. This means that you can set up an easily link to click on from within the application. For example, if your task was to go to a specific website every day - you could set the URL to that website which would make your task 1 less step.

This also works with iOS URL Schemes meaning you can launch a specific application (Example: a Journal App) on click which can be very useful and leads into the next section.

Shortcuts Integration

Streaks integrates with the iOS app Shortcuts (and if you're not using this app yet you 100% should be). What this does is allows you to check off tasks for the day via an action on your phone. If you wanted to set up an icon on the home screen that checks off your task for the day (making it one step easier) you can do that. You can also utilize the Automations feature in Shortcuts to automatically complete a task for the day if you launch a specific application.

Using a Journal app Dario as an example again, every time you open the Journal app for the first time during a day, you can have Shortcuts auto complete your task for the day in Streaks. This makes it again a task that is tracked by no additional work on your part and is a fantastic feature. I firmly believe that the less actual opening of the tracking app you have to do, the better and the longer you will stick with completing your goals.

No matter what the tracking/logging application is, I will be interested in it for 2-3 weeks. Once that honeymoon period is over, I'll stop opening it and tracking my behaviors. If those behaviors are actually being tracked in the background and I'm only getting notifications about incomplete actions - then thats the perfect scenario for me and that's what we have with Streaks.

Statistics

The stats page per behavior is fairly robust, showing you plenty of options and stats based on the last 7 and 30 days as well as a calendar view which makes it simple to see when you have and haven't been on your game.

You can see all of your behaviors at once or in a summary type page - both good for different reasons.

In conclusion, I think that Streaks has a ton of good things going for it and I don't have a lot of negative things to say about it. It does cost $5, but for an application that does all this, I don't think that you'll be upset spending the equivalent of a cup of coffee.

Thanks for reading!