When it comes to health motivation, keeping healthy habits, tracking your mental health, having an app on the phone to help you pursue and stick to these new habits has become very popular in the past few years. 

That’s especially good news for startups and mobile app developers who are always looking to build useful apps that are meaningful for their audience’s lives. 

We’ll start our review of habit tracking apps with Fabulous, a cool tracker and health motivation app that helps you introduce new habits into your day-to-day life. We took it for a test drive for a week, and then followed it up with several other apps in the same industry as they got recommended by the App Store and had good reviews. We’ll list all the things we think make Fabulous such a popular mobile app, but also say where we’ve found room for improvement. 

If you’re thinking of creating your habit tracker or life coach mobile app, reach out to us to find out how we’d do it.

Fabulous app review

Fabulous – Motivate me! Presents itself with a nice design, a user-friendly look and some really smart features, promising to help any user to improve their life from the first day of use. 

But if you’ve ever tried to adopt a new habit, you know it’s not as easy as it seems, and many habits fizz out after a couple of days. 

This app’s bet is on a virtual coach, whose actions are backed by science, in our pocket (well, our Android or iOS phones, more precisely). Of course, getting your coach to help you stick to your new habit is a big promise to make, and very few apps actually manage to keep it. Fabulous does a good job for the recommended habits it has included in its ecosystem.

After setting up an account, using the habit app is pretty straightforward and easy. But if you get stuck in the process, there are notifications to help you to get from one step to the next, until you learn how things work. To be fair, that shouldn’t be a problem, given the fabulous UX and UI – yes, pun intended.

What’s great about the app:

  • The app guides you through different journeys, depending on your own personal goals – to sleep better, to focus more, to lose weight, and so on.
  • There are lots of built-in habit recommendations available – Meditate, Call Your Parents, Drink Water, write a To-Do List.
  • The app offers research-based reminders and guides to help you reach your established goals.

What’s not great about the app:

  • Having limited onboarding challenges available as a new user.
  • Having to write your to-do list in the notebook. It would be better to do it directly in the app.
  • You can only work on one habit at a time (it can get a bit boring with simpler habits).
  • There is such a thing as too many notifications – luckily, you can deactivate notifications in the app settings.

Best practices in similar health motivation apps

Fabulous might be a fabulous life coach app, but it’s got some serious competition, both in the Apple Store and Google Play. Apps like Headspace, Way of Life, or Habitica are very popular with mobile users, and they each bring something extra to the table. Many of the features you’ve seen in Fabulous are features you’ll see here as well.

Headspace stands out with its very friendly UI and the voice of their founder Andy Puddicombe talking you through almost all the meditation sessions. Currently, they’ve also added relaxation sessions when you’re feeling sleepless, as well as workout sessions. The quality recording and personal storytelling make for a very intimate listening experience every time you open the app. Talk about going the extra mile for that personal touch!

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Habitica turns habit-building into the best parts of a role-playing game. The app sets you up with an avatar that you can upgrade, equip, and go on quests with by sticking to your real-life to-do lists. The app combined the best parts of gamification and habit building for those of us who are motivated by games and collecting. Nostalgic pixel art is also part of the UI.

Way of Life keeps it simple for all those data lovers out there. The app has customisable notifications and challenges that you can set yourself. And with your personal dashboard, you can track your progress across a longer time and see how you’re doing. 

Remente comes with a holistic approach, helping you set up goals and match your day-to-day to what you want to achieve in the long run. The app helps you track your activities, as well as your mood and suggests content streaks to help improve yourself.

Momentum is built exclusively for the iOS ecosystem. The advantage of that is that while the app has a simple UI and flexible features allow for a very straightforward setup of habit goal, if you’re used to working with iOS devices, you’ll be notified on the one you’re active on.

Fabulous and its competitors are, well, quite fabulous habit tracker apps, and we really enjoyed using them, but there’s definitely room for improvement. After playing around with them for a few days, some things stood out to us. That got us thinking about what features we would include, were we to build the best habit tracking app for mobile. 

If you’d like to read how Tapptitude would build its perfect habit tracking app, keep reading.