Tiny Habits · A habit app for iPhone
Coming soonDo one small thing. Then another.
The habit app that doesn’t punish you. A deck of 431 small activity cards deals you a few each day, paced by what you actually finish.
NO STREAKS INSIDE
No account. Nothing leaves your phone. 429 of the 431 cards cost nothing.
0.9566 ≈ 3.4%
Diagram, not a screenshot
The arithmetic nobody runs
Pick one habit. Repeat it every single day. Then one Tuesday gets away from you.
Suppose you are genuinely excellent and complete your habit 95% of days. The probability your unbroken streak survives to day 66 is about 3.4%. The streak was always going to break. It is not a measure of your character; it is a mechanic engineered so that absence costs you something, and it guarantees that almost everyone — including the most consistent people alive — has a visible, dramatic failure within weeks.
The habit research is real: repeat a behaviour in a stable context and it becomes automatic. But that research studies the people who kept repeating. Everything we can observe about the much larger group who stopped says the same thing. Doing the same small thing every day, forever, is monotonous. Monotony reads as boredom, boredom reads as weak willpower, and people quit carrying a story about their own inadequacy that was actually a design flaw in the method.
It was never you. Repetition is what defeats people.
Not an app that forms a particular habit. An app for the super-habit of doing things.
Every day the deck deals you a few small cards — three minutes here, ten minutes there — suited to who you actually are. You do them, tap done, and once in the evening you may tap the one you loved. That is the whole loop. Tomorrow the deal is different. Sameness lives in exactly one place: the ritual of drawing your cards.
A person who does three small, different things a day for fifty days has done a hundred and fifty things. Almost none of them are habits in the textbook sense. All of them happened. Unlike a streak, "I am someone who does things" cannot be destroyed by one bad Tuesday.
Four taps and no typing.
From first launch to your first hand of cards. Then the app has nothing more to show you, and that is deliberate: the deal is finite and it ends.
01 · DRAW
Open the app. Today's cards are already dealt. No "start my day" button, no deciding.
02 · DO
Three to six cards, one to ten minutes each. Tap the ring to finish one.
03 · OR DON'T
Skip with an honest reason. Nothing rolls over. Nothing accumulates.
04 · LOVE ONE
Once the day is closed, tap the card you loved. That one tap teaches the deck.
It grows as you finish, not as you promise.
Everyone starts at 10 minutes a day, dealt as three cards. You never set that number and you never can — there is no difficulty picker anywhere in the app. From there it moves on evidence.
85% or morea weekly window at that rate and the budget goes up by one minute.
Below 70%twice in a row at the same level and it steps gently back down. One bad week is weather; two is climate.
70 to 85%a deliberate neutral band where nothing happens at all.
Then a holdwhen your sustainable rate is found it holds there for 66 days and stops pushing, even if you are completing everything.
Ten minutes to start, an hour by next year, earned a minute at a time. Cards get more numerous as the budget grows, never longer, so the deal stays made of small things. The controller is modelled on TCP congestion control: additive increase, backoff on a confirmed stall, then a long hold — the same shape as an algorithm that has spent forty years finding the sustainable rate of a link it cannot interrogate.
Silence costs you nothing
- A day you opened and ignored is measured identically to a day you never opened: as nothing at all.
- Saying "I didn't want to" still counts as showing up. A skipped card is a finished card.
- The completion rate is withheld for your first seven evaluated days, because rendering an empty first morning as 0% turns a fresh start into a failing grade.
- Your lifetime count of things done can only ever go up.
Time off is a button, not a failure
- Pause, and nothing is dealt, nothing is learned, nothing decays. You can still draw anyway on holiday.
- Come back from a week away and the next week is dealt and counted but deliberately not graded.
- Gone five days without saying so? The app asks "Were you away?" and one tap rewrites those days so the controller never saw them.
- A pause never burns your first ten days, and a holiday cannot spend the 66-day hold.
431 cards, six kinds of doing.
Every card is one to ten minutes, and most of the deck sits at two to five. Each is authored against a three-word test: doable in one sitting, fun enough that nobody feels dutiful mid-card, and lovable enough to plausibly win your evening vote. No card may guilt, compare, or demand a purchase.
99
Mind
learning, curiosity, puzzles
81
Body
movement, stretching, breath
67
Hands
making, fixing, tidying as satisfaction
64
Heart
connection, reaching out, gratitude
61
Senses
savouring, noticing, being outside
59
Play
whimsy, silliness, the thing you did at fifteen
Shaped to your life, not to a generic user
Seven life-shapes, each with a 251-card view drawn from 221 universal cards plus a 30-card pack of their own. Twenty everyday labels map onto them, and if none fits you can type your own: your exact words are kept, not just the bucket.
The deal is fair by construction
- One slot in each deal belongs to your loved cards, and it is invisible, with its position shuffled, so you can never tell which card came from where.
- A seven-day echo window stops a card you just did from returning tomorrow.
- The deal is deterministic, computed on your device from your install identity and the day number. Reinstall from a backup and you get the identical hand.
- The app refuses to promise a budget the deck cannot fill.
A coach with no word for failure.
A chat-shaped thread that speaks the engine's state in plain English. Rule-based and entirely on-device: no model, no server, no network, and no text field to type into. There is no branch anywhere in it that mentions a missed day, a lapse, or a broken streak.
How is my pace decided?
By what you actually finish, never by what you promise. That's the whole idea.
Can I do more than dealt?
Always. The deal is the floor, not the ceiling.
Three numbers, all of which survive a bad day.
Things donea lifetime count that only goes up.
14-day raterolling, never a streak, shown as a dash until it means something.
Minutes a dayyour capacity, with what moved it and when.
Pauses are drawn as gaps in the record rather than dips in the line. Deliberately not shown anywhere: a streak counter, a rank, a grade, a leaderboard, or a comparison to anyone else.
Your data is yours, structurally.
No account, no sign-up, no email, no password. There is no network code anywhere in the app or the engine, which is verifiable by absence rather than by policy. An append-only event log is the only source of truth, so every number on screen is recomputed by folding it, and "why did my number change?" is a replay rather than an investigation.
third-party deps = 0
usage-description keys = none
badge permission = never requested
export = the complete log, key-sorted JSON
Honest FAQ
Can I choose my own habits?
Not in the way other habit apps mean it. You teach the deck rather than configure it: love a card and it joins the rotation on a rhythm, say "I didn't want to" and its odds thin, say "not for me" and it retires permanently. There is exactly one place in the whole system where a preference decides eligibility, and it is that last one.
Why can't I set my own daily minutes?
Because a number you set is January optimism, and the app would then measure you against it. The budget moves on what you demonstrably finished. The deal is the floor, not the ceiling — you can always do more than dealt, and doing more is how the number rises.
Is there really no streak anywhere?
None. No streak counter, no rank, no grade, no leaderboard, no comparison. The daily reminder is built only from the forecasted deal and has no data path to whether you completed anything, so "never about a day you missed" is a structural guarantee rather than a copy promise.
How many notifications will I get?
One a day, never a second, naming the day's first three cards by title. Yesterday's is swept out of Notification Centre rather than left to pile up. Badge permission is never even requested, and the offer to enable reminders comes later in context rather than ambushing you during setup.
Does it cost anything to do the cards?
429 of the 431 cards cost nothing. No card may demand a purchase, and chores are admitted only when reframed as satisfaction: "one-drawer beautify", never "clean the kitchen".
Consistency should attach to showing up, not to sameness.
After my morning chai, I draw my cards.
Coming soonNo account · Nothing leaves your phone · Zero third-party dependencies