Trialo
Stop the coffee after two, sleep a little better, and three weeks later you still don't know whether it was the coffee. You were going to bed earlier anyway, the weather turned, and you'd started meditating more again. Trialo turns changes like that into a small experiment on yourself. Every evening you rate a thing or two (your mood, your energy) and tick off the new habit, and at the end the app compares the trial with a baseline from the weeks before. Quite often the answer really is that you can't quite say whether it was the coffee, and that's exactly what it tells you.
For that to work, Trialo wants a rating every day, even when no experiment is running. That's the only way to get a real baseline that a new habit can be compared against at all. And because every day goes up and down, an effect only counts once it's bigger than the normal swing. The app would rather say “you can't tell” once too often. Twenty-one numbers typed into a phone in the evening haven't earned a p-value, but Trialo does aim for a certain scientific rigour.
There are no streaks, no achievements and no comments on missed days. The app is meant to stay as minimal and uncomplicated as possible, and nobody should feel bad about breaking some streak. Habit trackers are ten a penny, and this is the one cut to my own needs. Whether anyone else needs it is still an open question.
- Every trial compared with the two weeks before it and with the normal day-to-day swing
- 22 ideas to try (meditation, an hour without screens before bed, …)
- Rate and tick straight from the home screen widget
- No account, no ads, no tracking; everything stays on the device
- English only so far
Interested in something similar?