Show HN: Sober not Sorry – free iOS tracker to help you quit bad habits (sobernotsorry.app)

58 points by molozhenko ↗ HN
I made Sober not Sorry, a clean and simple iOS tracker to help quit bad habits — alcohol, smoking, or anything else. Open it → log your start date → it tracks your streak. No ads, no sign-up, no subscriptions. I built it because most “sober” apps felt cluttered or too motivational. This one just quietly tracks progress and stays out of the way. Would love feedback — especially from people who use streak or sobriety trackers.

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Where is the app to start e.g. drinking, it is morally relativistic to say these are 'bad habits'
Just fyi - this app is from russia.

And there are other free apps that do the same.

I Am Sober is the most popular but it tries to upsell you so much. Weird when it does literally nothing except show your streak... glad to see some competition. I would use it but I'm on Android.
Clean idea and thoughtful execution. The no-ads, no-signup approach is refreshing—most sobriety apps feel bloated or pushy. Minimal streak tracking is exactly what many people want. Android version would be great to see.
Next year May I will be 20 years sober, quit drinking and smoking cold turkey.

All I can remember was that smoking was the most difficult habit to quit because I was a chain smoker and the withdrawals are no joke. So yeah if you want to start on this sober journey, just be ready.

This is a cool app, will download.

Question from somebody who is interested but who doesn't have a HN account: "How does it react if you break your streak?"
I wish you luck. Looks like a well-written app.

This is an area in which I have some experience (45 years clean). I've written a bunch of Recovery-assistive stuff, in my time, and continue to do so.

In my experience, if you are a true addict (as opposed to someone that has developed bad habits, but doesn't have the obsessive/compulsive disorder), then no app will work. It's a fart against a tornado. Those folks are a minority, though. I think most people could use this app.

But I feel as if everyone can benefit from self-discipline, and apps like this, work like fitness trackers. That can make major differences for many folks.

However, there's no "silver bullet." Self-Discipline is hard work. A lot of people want "easy solutions," and they don't really exist (except in fiction). Apps like this, simply help to focus and optimize that hard work.

Good stuff. I don't IOS much, but I've had a "days since <date>" shortcut on my phone homepage for some time. Today shows 411 days.
For alcohol, there are modern alternatives to quitting cold turkey that use science instead of willpower. Look into the Sinclair Method and Naltrexone if you're interested in such things.
I gave up on finding a pregnancy tracker with no sign in, let alone no ads, so I guess this is what I'm using now!
Really neat! I appreciate the out of the way, ad-free nature of the app.

After looking at it, a few pieces of feedback and a request:

-on the Health tab it cuts the title off (iPhone 15PM here) to say “how your health improv..”

-I would really like to be able to label my own custom tracker. Right now I have two that both say “habit free” which means nothing once you have multiple.

-Perhaps the above custom label request solves this one, but I think it’s too limiting a list to choose from. Smoking, for example- there are a loooot of ways to consume nicotine.

-I’d really love to be able to reset the counter when I stumble, but have a log in the counter of prior streaks to be proud of.

-I’m not exactly sure how this would look, but I’d absolutely use a feature that allowed you to count how many times you use nicotine in a day, for example, to aim for a lower number of uses the following day or week.

I love this idea, take or leave the feedback as you will; nice work!!

Instead of “other” , there should be a way to let users add their own habit and remove irrelevant ones from the list
Please be careful with alcohol withdrawal. Always talk to your doctor about it.

Your body sends out signals all the time, and those get numbed by the alcohol. So your body compensates with sending out stronger / more signals.

If you stop cold turkey stuff that compensation mechanism doesn't just stop and can lead to Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome

From my iPhone, opened the App store, typed Sober not Sorry and it was the 26th or 27th entry in the list. Why apple, why?
I guess no ads, hence author doesn't pay to promote it, hence Apple doesn't care much for users to find it even if it's objectively better than the other 25.