3 apps I'm actually using to keep my New Year's resolutions

By Admin

02 Jan, 2026

Introduction

Happy New Year from the team here at Android Authority! 🎉
Like every year, December got me thinking deeply about what I wanted to improve, change, and achieve in the year ahead. I spent time jotting down ideas, setting intentions, and refining my goals. For me, writing things down and visually tracking progress makes a huge difference in staying consistent.

Over the years, I’ve tried many methods and apps to track habits and resolutions. In 2025, however, I narrowed it down to three apps that genuinely helped me stay on track each offering a completely different approach. These are the apps I’m actually using and sticking with.

Here are my three favorite apps that can truly help you keep your New Year’s resolutions.

HabitKit – A Powerfully Simple Habit-Tracking App

HabitKit stands out because of its simplicity, which is exactly why it has been the easiest app for me to use consistently. Once you enter your habits and goals, each habit gets its own contribution graph. This grid of daily squares popularized by GitHub gives you a clear, glanceable view of your progress across the entire year.

Despite its minimal design, HabitKit offers impressive customization. Adding a habit is quick: give it a title, choose a color, and select a symbol or emoji. You can also set streak goals, add reminders, and group habits into categories for a cleaner view.

One feature I particularly like is the ability to set how many times you want to complete a habit each day. The more you complete it, the darker the square becomes making progress visually satisfying. HabitKit also includes strong analytics, which help you see how small daily wins add up over time.

Pro tip: Use HabitKit’s widgets. Placing a habit’s contribution graph on your home screen keeps your goals front and center every day.

HabitKit is available on Android and iOS.

Finch – A Digital Companion to Keep You Going

If you remember Tamagotchi, Finch will feel instantly familiar but with a modern, meaningful twist. Finch is a digital pet that grows and thrives only when you check in daily and make progress on your real-life goals. It’s a refreshing and emotionally engaging way to build habits.

Finch leans heavily into self-care and mental well-being, encouraging habits like drinking water, taking deep breaths, or checking in with your emotions. While it can function as a standard habit tracker, it doesn’t feel like a productivity app at all. Instead, it gently nudges you to slow down and appreciate the small things in life.

The gamification is impressive. You can endlessly customize your pet and its home, add real-life friends, and unlock rewards all driven by your self-improvement efforts. Without realizing it, you’ll find yourself drinking more water, tidying your space, and checking in with yourself daily.

In a world full of lifeless productivity tools, Finch feels warm, motivating, and surprisingly effective.

To-Do List + Calendar – A Tried-and-True Method

Google Calendar, paired with Google Tasks, can be turned into a surprisingly effective habit-tracking system. Since Tasks is built directly into Google Calendar, it’s easy to schedule recurring habits alongside your daily commitments.

To make this work smoothly, I recommend creating a dedicated Tasks list specifically for habits. This keeps your habit tracking separate from daily to-dos. Set each habit with a recurring frequency and add reminders so nothing slips through the cracks.

The biggest advantage of this method is accessibility. Unlike many habit apps that are mobile-only, Google Calendar and Tasks work seamlessly across mobile, desktop, and the web. Your habits also appear directly in your calendar view, making it easier to see how they fit into your daily routine.

The downside is the lack of built-in progress tracking. There are no streaks, analytics, or visual summaries, which means this approach requires more self-discipline. However, the simplicity and universal availability make it a solid option for many people.

Google Calendar is available on Android, iOS, and the web.

Find What Works for You

Habit-tracking apps are everywhere, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of constantly switching between them. Setting up a new app over and over again can become a distraction in itself trust me, I’ve been there.

The key is to find what genuinely works for you and stick with it. Once you find an app that fits your mindset and lifestyle, commit to it. Give it time at least until the end of 2026 and you’ll likely be surprised by how much progress you’ve made.