Habit Tracker - Habbbit

Build habits that stick. Time every session with a focus stopwatch, grow your streak, hit daily goals, and unlock motivational quotes as you go.

Comment

Inspiration

Most habit trackers on the store ask for the absolute minimum: tap a checkbox, mark it done, and move on. But building real routines—whether studying, reading, meditating, or working out—requires actual focused time and effort.

I needed an app that wasn't just a static checklist, but an active focus tool. I wanted a habit tracker centered around a dedicated focus stopwatch to measure real time spent, coupled with a GitHub-style activity heatmap to visually reflect consistency over time—all without forcing users to create an account or store sensitive routine data on a third-party server.

What it does

Habbbit turns any habit into a visual streak you don't want to break. Instead of just checking a box, Habbbit gives you a focus stopwatch so you actually time your sessions, track daily progress bars, and watch small daily blocks build into a real streak.

  • Focus Stopwatch: Pick a habit, tap start, and focus—with built-in session ticks, interval chimes, and screen wakelock so your device doesn't sleep mid-session.
  • Visual Progress & Heatmaps: View your habits on a contribution graph (heatmap) and unlock deep productivity insights showing your best days and peak hours.
  • Streak Milestones & Motivation: Unlock hand-picked motivational quotes as you hit goals and maintain streaks.
  • Account-Free Cloud Backup: Keep history and settings backed up using native platform auto-backups—your data remains entirely yours without creating an account.
  • Fair Global Access: Integrated Purchase Power Parity (PPP) so regional pricing automatically adjusts around the world.

How we built it

In the modern AI era, my role evolved into product architect and director. I defined the end-to-end vision, designed the app's stateless timing system, and instructed AI agents with explicit engineering directives to implement core features, analytics, and UI components.

  • Frontend & UX: Built with light/dark theme support, habit-specific custom colors, and distraction-free session screens.
  • Monetization & Localization: Integrated RevenueCat with targeted Purchase Power Parity (PPP) overrides to ensure fair pricing globally.
  • Data & Backups: Implemented native platform auto-backup rules so habit history and settings persist without an external database or account creation.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest engineering challenge was handling mobile memory management. Modern operating systems aggressively kill or freeze background processes to preserve battery life and RAM.

Initially, a traditional stopwatch relying on an active background counter would break or pause whenever the OS killed the process. To solve this, we shifted to a stateless state reconstruction architecture:

  1. When a user starts a timing session, the initial timestamp ($t_0$) is instantly persisted to disk.
  2. Whenever the app resumes or unfreezes, it calculates the elapsed time delta ($\Delta t = t_{\text{current}} - t_0$).

This ensures $100\%$ timing accuracy even if the app process is terminated completely in the background.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Resilient Architecture: Perfected a stopwatch engine that never loses track of time, even through OS background process kills or app restarts.
  • Privacy-First Design: Built a rich feature set—including heatmap history, custom colors, and streak tracking—completely locally, with automatic seamless backups and no forced logins.
  • Global Accessibility: Successfully deployed RevenueCat targeting to support regional Purchase Power Parity (PPP) on day one.

What we learned

Building Habbbit taught us that developing modern mobile apps requires a fundamentally different philosophy regarding background lifecycle management. You cannot assume an app remains active in memory; designing stateless systems based on time deltas rather than active counters is crucial for reliability. Additionally, we learned how to effectively leverage AI coding agents as direct implementation execution units by providing clear system architecture boundaries.

What's next for Habit Tracker - Habbbit

  • Home Screen Widgets: Bring heatmaps and active streaks directly to the iOS and Android home screens for quick glanceable progress.
  • Wearable Integration: Expand the focus stopwatch onto smartwatch platforms so users can time routines without opening their phone.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history