Appy, an iOS app to help you quit your bad habits

It has been a while since I wanted to create something helpful to others, not than just another random app. Then I found out there were not so many great sobriety apps, so I launched one. Here is Appy, to help you quit your bad habits.

It all started last year. I had a bit of extra time and thought I could help. I looked a lot into charity organizations and how I could help with my coding skills but it’s quite hard to bring skills to charity table. So I kept looking.

Around the same time, I found from Tyler Watamanuk that sobriety apps were not so pretty.

From his analysis, sobriety apps lack of good user experience. This goes from the design to the service altogether.

The majority of sobriety-based apps are ugly and clunky and lack the veneer of glossy modernism and effortless usability that coats the other apps and websites we use on a daily basis.

But then it got more interesting. Still from his post, there is an actual need for it.

approximately 40 million Americans meet the clinical criteria for addiction involving nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs, according to the Center on Addiction at Columbia University.

So I mentioned it to my good friend Charlotte Wakefield, and we had a closer look at it.

Appy doesn’t aim to be a fix them all application. We started small and just wanted to create a good experience, an app where you can log your feeling and feedback without being judged by it or others.

In short, a safe and friendly app. That’s why we tried to ban any negative words like “addiction”, “sobriety”, “sober” as much as possible.

The name was also chosen to differentiate to others. I’m not sure people want having “SoberApp”, “QuitDrinkingApp” or any related names on their home screen. The way other people perceive it has also an impact on the user. So we chose something differently and as light of meaning as possible.

At the moment, the application allows you to choose which bad habit to quit. It doesn’t need to be in top 5 addictions like smoking, drinking, gambling, etc. User can define its own habit to quit, maybe a sweet tooth or too much time spent on video games maybe?

After that, the application is a dashboard capturing every day if the user relapsed and how he feels to track the progression.

We already prepared other extra features but chose to come back to the simplest version to get a first feedback before going to the wrong direction.

We hope to be able to recreate a close connection with mobile users as I did in the app with Japan Direct. From feedbacks and suggestions, users helped me make the app it became today.

To address the right issue, the app is only available in US and UK based on available study.

Finally, Appy is completely private. Any information capture stays between the user and the device, no backend, no sharing.

Even if it’s at an early stage, I hope this project can become something and actually help people. Worse case, if nobody use it, it was still good time to experiment something different.

Thanks again to my friend Charlotte for helping me in this project, designing this app and going through the whole project together.