No streaks. Here's why.
A journaling app without streaks. A habit tracker without streaks. On purpose.
Most apps that help you do something every day keep a count of the days you did it. The count works, for a while. People build thousand-day runs on nothing but not wanting to see the number go back to zero.
Then one day you're sick, or travelling, or the app fails to save, and the number goes to zero anyway. Read the reviews of any habit or gratitude app and you will find the same sentence in different words: after I broke the streak, there was no reason to keep going. Some apps now sell you the streak back for a dollar. That tells you what the count was really for.
A missed day is information, not a punishment.
Northern Sky keeps no count. Every morning it asks two questions: what's the one thing you'll do today, and what are you thankful for. The next morning, before anything else, it asks whether you did yesterday's thing. Yes or no. That answer is the whole scoreboard, and it belongs to yesterday, not to a run.
What replaces the streak
The question itself. A streak asks whether you opened the app. The morning-after question asks whether you did what you said. It is harder to answer and it means more, and nothing about it gets worse if you skip a Tuesday.
One thing, not a list. A tracker with fourteen habits produces fourteen ways to fall short before breakfast. One commitment a day is small enough to keep and honest enough to admit when you didn't.
A record, not a score. The Past keeps every morning: the commitment with how it went, and the gratitude on its own. Thirty days of dots, one per day, so you can see the shape of a month. Never a total, never a trend, never a number to protect.
What it feels like to miss a day
Nothing happens. The next morning there is no question about yesterday, because you didn't make a commitment yesterday. It asks the two questions and the day begins. The gap sits in The Past as a blank dot, which is all it was.
If you want the pressure of a count, there are excellent apps built around it, and this isn't one of them. If you have quit a tracker because the count started to feel like a debt, this was built for you.
Two questions, every morning
Northern Sky is a morning check-in for iPhone. Free, and everything you write stays on your phone. Read more on the front page, or see why it asks for one thing and how the morning-after question works.