init.Habits

Beta is live. TestFlight invites are being sent right now to everyone on the waitlist. If you signed up at inithabits.com check your email. If you didn't, you still can — link is the same. Months of work, now in your hands. Let's do this! #iosdev

You drop that JSON file into init.Habits, and your habits, streaks, and history carry over. No manual re-entry. No CSV wrangling. No waiting for me to build support for your specific app. Just screenshots and a prompt. Still working on it, but the early tests are promising.

So here’s the approach: instead of building importers, I give you a detailed prompt for your LLM of choice. You paste it in along with screenshots of whatever habit tracker you’ve been using. The LLM reads your screenshots and turns them into a structured JSON file.

Been thinking about how to let people carry their data over to init.Habits from another app. Nobody wants to start from zero. The problem: hundreds of habit trackers, all storing data differently. Spent a while on this and landed on something I haven’t seen other apps try.

I’ve been wondering: do you think a habit tracker belongs more in Productivity, or Health category?

Latest init.Habits beta is out today. Been shipping updates almost daily based on tester feedback. Every build is a little better than the last one. Grateful for everyone testing and reporting back. #iosdevelopment #iosdev #buildinpublic

@code_codeforge Making a habit tracker that looks like a terminal (iOS)

Gm It's weekend Let's market your startup, Drop link 👇

babe wake up, init.Habits beta now has different fonts #buildinpublic #iosdev #iosbeta

Developers, I want to beta test some apps! Drop your TestFlight invite in comments, and I’ll check out as many as I can. #iosbeta #indiedev #buildinpublic

@Jeremieca Pulling from Apple Health directly! Considered adding a write option as well, but did not see a strong enough use case. So instead focused on making read only function bulletproof.

@inithabits A terminal-style habit tracker is such a unique angle. Auto-syncing with health data removes so much friction from tracking. Are you pulling from Apple Health directly, or does it work through HealthKit with custom integrations for things like steps and sleep?

Soon available in init.Habits beta: auto-sync with your health data to complete habits. I love this feature so much. The app is slowly nearing its official release. #buildinpublic #iosdev #cli #appdevelopment

New init.Habits update is available for beta testers. Connect to your Health data to auto complete habits with steps, sleep, activity, and more. I’ve shipped 9 updates in the last 10 days, and getting close to releasing the official 1.0! #iosdev #buildinpublic #appdevelopment

init.Habits now has three font sizes. The smallest is still my favourite, it looks the most like an actual terminal. But plenty of testers found it too small, so there are two larger options now. Pick whichever you want. #indiedev #appdesign #ios

Took a walk to figure out whether a feature I was building was actually good. Got halfway and realised I’d been thinking about lunch for twenty minutes. The feature was fine. I was hungry.

The whole point: not every habit is the same shape. Some are daily, some are "a few times this week, I'll figure out which days," some are "every day if I can but only enforce it on 4." The app should fit how the habit actually exists in your life, not the other way around.

You set a target, say 3 days a week. Complete it on whichever days you want. The app counts toward the weekly total, not specific weekdays. And once you hit the target, you choose: the habit can disappear from your day view, or stick around so you can keep going past it.

New in init.Habits beta: weekly goals. "Gym 3 times this week" instead of "gym every Monday, Wednesday, Friday." Most requested feature by testers, and honestly the one I should've shipped first. Here's how it works. #iosdev #indiedev #iosapp

Got accepted into Apple's Small Business Program. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme, but a nice little nod when you're a solo dev shipping an app from your kitchen table. Onwards. #iosdev #indiedev #apple

Final count: 100+ icon sets shipped to support what the picker shows as 23 choices. Took way longer than I expected. But now you can run Catppuccin Mocha at night and Solarized Light by day, and your home screen actually keeps up. No alerts, no broken icons. Worth it.

The fix: iOS will swap icons silently in the background, but only if you ship them as pre-bundled light/dark pairs. Which means I couldn't just have 23 icons. I had to generate every possible light-dark combination so users could mix and match freely. The math gets ugly fast.

init.Habits has 23 themes. I wanted people to pair any light icon with any dark one, so the home screen icon matches their theme in both modes. Sounded reasonable. Turns out iOS does not make this easy. Here's how I made it work. #iosdev #buildinpublic