Bad habits are easy to learn but hard to overcome. Bad habits always seem to find a way into our lives, and we can’t usually stop them until it’s too late. Luckily, there are great iPhone apps out there that can help you beat bad habits and achieve your goals.
Some of these apps also help form good habits in the process. Whether you’re looking to quit coffee or to stop using your phone so much, there is an app out there that can help you through this journey.
1. Strides
Strides is one of the most popular habit trackers on the market. Designed for both tracking both good and bad habits, you can quit your bad habits and build new ones simultaneously.
Strides gives you the flexibility to choose how you track good and bad habits. You can create a custom tracker, and label it as a good or bad habit within the app.
At the end of the day, you will get a notification to log your habits for the day. If you did a good habit, you can mark it as done. If you didn’t do a bad habit, it will mark it as complete automatically.
By seeing how often you do your bad habits, you may begin to notice patterns in your life. For example, you might notice that you break your streak every weekend and can work to resolve that.
Download: Strides (Free, subscription available)
2. HabitShare
Similar to Strides, HabitShare is also a habit tracker for your iPhone. It has a similar layout, and you can create your habits here easily. For bad habits, you can create a tracker for avoiding a certain habit.
If you succeed, you mark it as so and that habit will light up green for that day. If you fail, it will light up red.
HabitShare is a very simple tracker with few features, but it does have one fantastic feature that sets it apart from all other habit trackers: HabitShare has a built-in accountability feature, where you can add friends and they can view your habit trackers.
By having friends hold you accountable, you might be more willing to make an effort. After all, it’s easy to cheat on a goal if you’re the only one who knows about it. When somebody else can see your potential setbacks, you might twice before breaking our streak.
You can message your friends within the app as well, to motivate and inspire one another to follow your goals. HabitShare is the easiest habit-sharing app for accountability partners.
Download: HabitShare (Free)
3. Days Since
Days Since was developed as a sobriety app but has tons of other functions that make it a great app to help you quit your bad habits, no matter what they are. Whether you want to quit caffeine or smoking, Days Since can help with that and more.
Essentially, Days Since is a quit tracker. You create a clock for the habit you want to quit, and it will track how many days it’s been since you decided to break that habit.
That’s all you need to do, and you can focus on the hard part—quitting your habit. Having the tracker there keeps you accountable to stay on the right path.
One unique feature of Days Since is the reset counter. All habit apps allow you to reset if you feel like you’ve neglected your goals and want to start over. Days Since does this as well, but will show you all of your past resets.
This is for accountability and to show you trends of what might cause you to start over.
Days Since also has a widget feature, so you can add a widget to your home screen for extra motivation if you need it.
Download: Days Since (Free)
4. Flora
If you are like most people, you might spend a bit too much time on your phone. After all, phone addiction is one of the most common addictions these days. So if your frequent phone use is causing you to procrastinate, the Flora app can help with that.
Flora is an app designed to help you avoid using your phone for set periods of time. You start by downloading the app and setting the amount of time you want to put away your phone and focus on a task. The default is 25 minutes.
Once this is set, Flora will begin planting a virtual tree. If you use your phone at all during those 25 minutes, the tree will die. If you avoid using your phone for those 25 minutes, the tree will be added to your forest.
If you continue to use the Flora app, you can grow your virtual forest and see how many times you’ve put your phone away to work on a task. The best part of Flora is that if you activate the paid feature, you can contribute to planting real trees in real life as well.
Download: Flora (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Tally
Tally is a habit-tracking app on steroids. Most habit tracking apps just have basic tracking features, but Tally does so much more than that.
Like all other habit trackers, you can create habits you want to build or habits you want to avoid, and begin tracking them. You can set daily, weekly, or monthly goals.
For those looking to quit bad habits, Tally makes it easy to quit at your own pace. Instead of avoiding coffee, you can limit yourself to one or two cups a week. If you want to quit eating sugar, you can set Tally to allow you to eat it once per day.
With so much flexibility, you can start cutting back on your bad habits slowly and find something that works for you.
Aside from the flexible tracker, Tally also provides insights into all of your habits. With these insights, you can discover what makes you meet or fail your goals. You can also track how much money you save if you quit smoking, stop drinking coffee, or avoid other expensive habits.
Download: Tally (Free, subscription available)
Quit Your Bad Habits For Good
Bad habits are hard to quit. After all, we wouldn’t be doing them if they didn’t bring us some sense of comfort. While that may seem beneficial, habits like excessive caffeine may cause problems later in life.
If you have a bad habit you want to quit, there are great apps out there that can help. As you continue to work towards quitting your bad habits, you can replace them with good habits that also bring you a new sense of comfort. No matter where you are on your habit quitting journey, these apps can meet you where you are.