Habit trackers that grow a tree

There are around a dozen of these now — a tree, a plant, a garden, a forest. They look alike in a screenshot and behave very differently in month four, and the difference comes down to one question you should ask before you plant anything.

the question: what happens when you miss a day

Every one of these apps has to answer it, and the answers fall into three groups.

it dies	the plant withers or is lost, and you start a new one
it resets	the plant returns to a seed or an earlier stage, and the growth is gone
it holds	the plant keeps what it grew; a miss costs something smaller and bounded

The first two are the same bet: the plant is a hostage, and the fear of losing it is the motivation. That works until the day you lose it, which is the day most people stop opening the app — and, worse, the day the picture stops being a record of what you did.

We are not going to list other apps’ behaviour here from their store descriptions, because store descriptions are the developer’s own words and they change. Install one and miss a day on purpose. It is a two-day experiment and it tells you more than any comparison page.

what RIPEN does

RIPEN is in the third group, and it is specific about the price.

One tree for everything, not a plant per habit. The identity you chose — “i am someone who takes care of my body” — grows from the trunk as a limb, and the habits that get you there are branches on it.
A marked day grows a leaf on that habit’s branch, and makes the branch longer.
A missed day costs leaves, never growth. The 1st missed day in a row drops 1 leaf, the 2nd drops 2, the 3rd and every one after it drops 3 — and never more than 3 a day. One marked day stops the run.
Branches never get shorter. The fallen leaves lie on the ground under the tree, so a bad month is visible as a bare branch and a pile of leaves, not as a tree that went back to being a seed.
A fruit grows when a branch holds 66 leaves at once, and turns gold when you root the habit. A gold fruit stays for good.
A habit you quit stays as a stub, as thick as the branch had grown. The time you put into something you stopped is still on the tree.

Nothing in there can take you back to zero. From a full branch of 66 leaves, losing the green fruit takes 23 missed days in a row — and if you know you will be away, a break gives every habit up to 7 days that cost nothing at all.

a note on focus timers

Apps that grow a tree while your phone stays locked are solving a different problem: one session of attention, right now. The tree there is a timer with a picture. RIPEN’s tree is the record of years, and it has no focus timer. If what you want is to stop touching your phone for 25 minutes, those are the right apps and this is not one.

what it costs

Free gives one identity with five habits. Pro is bought once, not monthly. There is no account, no analytics and no ads. What RIPEN costs, why there are no points, or get the app.