Ago

The obvious playbook is the streak model - Duolingo-style daily chains, achievement unlocks, guilt-framed nudges. I considered it and deliberately went the other way.

• The research pointed away from gamification. Mapping 15 apps and clustering 500+ App Store reviews with Claude in an afternoon, the recurring pattern was resentment: "I get angry at notifications and rebel against my own authority."
• Streaks work for language learning because daily practice is the point. Wrong for a dog bath - you don't fail bathing Hanx by breaking a chain, you just lack a neutral way to see the fact

So: no streaks, badges, or "don't break the chain." Every word in the app shows elapsed time accurately and lets the user decide what to do about it.

• Every competitor frames around habits, sobriety, milestones, or countdowns - none around the recurring-but-irregular task that resists a schedule
• Consequence for reminders: when you log something done, the deadline resets from that date - not from the missed schedule. This is what Todoist and Apple Reminders get wrong; a missed recurring task just accumulates
• A r/adhdwomen thread said it independently, several times: a late monthly task should restart from when you actually did it. Ago's reminders always count days from last done

Ago is free to download - three real items and nearly all features before any ask (only custom colors and icons are gated). Subscriptions were considered and rejected:

• Most competitors charge $3-50/yr; "bait and switch" appears more than almost any other pattern across the review corpora
• Days Since sits at 3.4 stars after paywalling once-free features; Since: Day Counter gets constant one-time-purchase requests despite $49.99 lifetime; Last Time Tracker's $2.99 pay-once is "best two dollars I ever spent"

• $4.99 once, chosen deliberately: $2.99 now reads as "abandoned app," $6.99+ hits sticker shock against a clear ~$5 ceiling in the review data. Anyone who reaches the paywall has already used three real items
• Pay-once is also a trust signal - a clean one-time unlock is the opposite of what the category is angry about

• V1 shipped a 2-column card grid; beta testers found it hard to scan. The home screen's job is comparison, and a grid forces lateral eye movement between columns
• Full-width single-column rows show 7-8 items at once, every number left-aligned at the same position: one vertical scan tells you everything
• Log-done lives on the card itself - no tap into a detail screen, unlike every competitor. No confirm dialog: a 4s undo toast, and the card holds position 650ms so you see the number reset before the list re-sorts

Worst first launch for an app like this: opens empty, the user doesn't know what to add, and closes it. The whole first-run flow targets that.

• Onboarding doesn't explain features - it uses concrete examples ("wash the car," "call mom," "water the plants") to trigger "oh, I should track that," then shows those same things as cards with elapsed time
• The last slide asks "What have you been meaning to keep track of?" with three starter items, not a blank field
• The templates library ("Browse ideas") adds 60+ pre-built items across home, health, and relationships - recognize yourself instead of inventing from scratch
• Notification permission isn't requested on launch - it comes up the first time you set a reminder, where the reason is obvious

A calm utility still has to feel crafted at icon size and stay coherent as it grows - so Ago needed a real mark and a system, not just screens.

• The logo is a single looping link, drawn on a grid in Illustrator: two forms joined in a continuous loop for recurrence - the "again" in Ago - refined from a blocky grid form to the final rounded sage mark
• The app's visual language is extracted into a versioned, hosted design system - OKLCH tokens, components, motion - so light and dark and every screen stay consistent