Way of Life alternative with numbers attached

Quick verdict

Way of Life has been on the App Store since the first generation of habit apps and its central idea has aged better than almost anything that came after: every day is green, red or skipped, and the chart of those three colours tells you the truth. miniHabits keeps that clarity and adds the values, the timers and the statistics that the three-state model cannot hold.

What Way of Life does better

The trichotomy. Yes, no, skip. Most trackers only have “done” and “not done”, which quietly turns every rest day into a failure. Way of Life understood in 2010 that a skipped day is a real category, and a lot of newer apps still have not caught up.

Notes and journal entries per day. You can attach a reason to a red day, which turns the chart into something you can actually read six months later.

The chart itself. Simple bars of colour per habit, scannable in two seconds, no gamification layer between you and the record.

Longevity. It is still here, still maintained, and it never turned into an ad-supported feed.

Where it stops being a good fit

Three states is all there is. There is no counter for eight glasses, no timer for a deep work block, no unit for kilometres or kilograms, and no Health integration. If your habit has a number, Way of Life stores whether you hit it and forgets what it was.

The free tier caps you at a handful of habits, and the interface is showing its age next to what iOS 17 and 18 made possible: widgets are limited, there are no Live Activities, and the Dynamic Island is not used at all.

The statistics stop at trend percentages over a period. Useful, but there is no weekday bias view, no time-of-day distribution, and no correlation between one habit and another.

How miniHabits handles the same job

Skipped days survive as a real state. Break mode freezes every habit for as long as it is on, and none of those days counts as a miss. On top of that, streak shields bank one per five consecutive days, up to three, so a genuine miss spends a shield and the chain holds while the log still shows red.

The five tracking modes cover what the three-state model cannot: checkbox for the Way of Life case, counter for eight glasses, timer with a Live Activity for a 90 minute block, quantity with any unit, and HealthKit for steps, sleep and workouts.

The statistics go where the chart pointed. A year heatmap, weekday bias, time of day, correlations between habits, and the shield ledger. The weekday chart is the one that repays reading, and there is a whole post about what mine said.

Pricing compared

Migrating your data

Way of Life exports CSV, which is the whole job: each row carries a date and a state, and the importer reads a date and a value per line. Map green to 1 and red to 0, or paste the file as it is and adjust.

Notes do not come across as notes. If those matter to you, keep the export file rather than deleting it, and use it as the archive.

FAQ

Does miniHabits have a skip state? Break mode freezes every habit at once, for as long as you leave it on, and none of those days breaks a chain.

Can I still track simple yes/no habits? Yes. Checkbox is the first of the five modes and it is one tap.

Is there an iPad or Mac version? Not yet. Web app in August 2026, then Android and Watch.

The honest recommendation

Stay with Way of Life if the three colours are exactly the amount of information you want, and if the per-day notes are the part you would miss. It is an honest, quiet app.

Move if your habits have numbers, if you want widgets and Live Activities from this decade, or if you want the chart to explain the pattern rather than just show it. The Everyday comparison is the closest neighbour if grid clarity is what you are optimising for.