Form Good Habits with Streaks

Making habits is a very hard thing to do, but luckily Streaks for iOS and WatchOS (Android may be coming) is here to help you out. Imagine Streaks as a to-do list that helps you form good habits. Choose up to twelve things that you want to turn into daily habits, and every time you complete a task, your streak is extended. If you don’t complete a task, your streak is broken. Streaks also has many cooler features such as HealthKit integration, a Today widget and more.

When you open Streaks, it will bring you through a quick tutorial and prompt you to make a task. These tasks are something that you want to turn into an everyday habit, for example learning a language or walking for a certain distance a day. Streaks will match an icon for that task depending on what you write, however you can change this later. Then, you select what days you want to do the task on. You can set the tasks for specific days, on a schedule, and much more. To complete a task, you simply press down and hold on it until the circle is filled fully.

The key to building a habit is to repeat it everyday, and Streaks helps you do this by making you not want to break your chain of habit completions, which are called Streaks. Every time you complete a task, your streak is extended. When you don’t complete that task, the streak is broken and is reset to zero days. This makes you want to keep that streak going for as long as possible, and therefore completing that habit for as long as possible. If you are going on holiday and don’t want the streak to be broken, Streaks allows you to pause that task so you don’t lose your streak1.

This task has a streak of 13
This task has a streak of 13

An interesting feature of Streaks is the HealthKit integration. You can set a task to work a set number of steps a day, and this task will automatically be completed when you have achieved that number of steps a day, using data from HealthKit that comes on your iPhone and Apple Watch. Similar things can be done with running a certain distance, climbing stairs and more. I think this is really neat as it forces you to actually complete that goal, and not just complete it for the sake of getting a streak.

A running goal on Streaks for Apple Watch
A running goal on Streaks for Apple Watch

Streaks also has a negative tasks feature, which works somewhat differently to normal tasks. When you make a negative task, it starts the day as complete, increasing the negative tasks streak. With negative tasks, you don’t want a streak, so completing the task breaks the streak. You can easily convert a normal task to a negative task in the task edit screen.

Reminders can also be set with Streaks, and this means that you will be reminded when you need to complete a task. These reminders can be set manually for each task, or automatic reminders can adjust automatically to keep you on track. You can also schedule when a task that needs to be completed will appear on the Streaks app badge.

I love statistics, and Streaks comes packed with them. You can view your best streak, your streak completions and more for each individual task or for all the tasks together. Streaks will also show you your average completions over days and the time you complete tasks. To view the in depth stats about your streaks, tap on the star icon that you see in the bottom right of the app.

You can share all these stats by tapping the share button on the bottom left, and then share them around the internet to show off how good you are at forming new habits.

To quickly view stats about a task, you can tap on that task in the home screen to see completed days, and quick information about best ever streak, your completion percentage and more.

Streaks is also extremely customisable. There are tons of different colour themes you can choose from, with different colour combinations. There are also 45 app icons you can select, which change that actual look of the app icon on the iOS home screen. There are also around 500 task icons that you can choose from, and these icons are the image that shows inside your task circle.

The Apple Watch app is great, and its very fast. You can now choose which page of tasks you want to show on the complication, and complete tasks from your Apple Watch. You can view the task in more detail from the watch app too, seeing what you have to do to complete that task if it is health related. Reminders to complete your tasks also come up on your Apple Watch.

On the left, multiple tasks seen on the Watch app. On the right, Streaks showing on the watch face
On the left, multiple tasks seen on the Watch app. On the right, Streaks showing on the watch face

Streaks is a really good app that allows you to start building better habits, and get rid of the bad ones. I would love to see iCloud sync that would allow you to easily sync your tasks between your devices2, but other than that I’ve had a really good experience with Streaks. If you want to form better habits, or break the bad ones you already have, I would really suggest downloading Streaks.

Streaks is available on the App Store for £3.99.

Thanks for reading!

  1. Kind of like in Snapchat.
  2. Streaks does offer an export/import function, but obviously you don’t want to be doing this much unless you are changing your device as it’s very time consuming.
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