Why there is no streak
Every journalling app has a streak. We removed ours before it existed, and the reasoning is not really about journalling at all.
A streak is a very good piece of engineering. It takes something you might do, attaches a number to it, and makes that number fragile. After a few weeks you are not writing because you want to. You are writing because a two-hundred-day number is about to become a zero.
For a language app that trade is arguably fine. For something you speak to at eleven at night about how the week went, it is not.
What a streak does to honesty
The cost is not the pressure itself. It is what the pressure does to what you write. When the number is watching, people file something. Three words, a full stop, done. The entry exists, the streak survives, and nothing true has been said.
Then the streak breaks, because it always breaks, and the app you associated with saying true things becomes the app you failed at. Most people do not come back after that, and the reason they give themselves is that they were never the journalling type.
They were the journalling type. They were never the scoreboard type, and the app made those the same thing.
What replaces it
Something has to hold the rhythm or you forget the app exists. Ours is that letters arrive on Fridays whether or not you have written anything. That is the difference between a reminder that asks you for something and one that gives you something.
There is no counter, no calendar with gaps in it, and no notification mentioning how long it has been. Disappear for a month and nothing scolds you when you return.
The things we also left out
- No follower count, no profiles, nothing anyone else can see by default.
- No red badge on the icon telling you that you owe the app something.
- No daily prompt to complete. Rare things arrive full-screen; the rest of the time it is quiet.
- No score for how you are doing at life. The Canvas fills in over time, but it does not rank you.
The honest cost of these decisions is retention. Streaks work, which is why everyone ships them. An app without one has to be worth opening on its own every single time, which is a harder product to build and a much easier one to defend.
This piece comes from the team behind Future Me Says — say what you can’t say elsewhere. a letter comes back..