Why Loma exists

I have used habit trackers for years, and I quit every single one of them.

It always ended the same way. I would build up a run I was quietly proud of, thirty or forty days of something small, and then one entirely ordinary evening, I would be too tired, too busy, or I would simply forget.

The next morning the number would be sitting at zero, as though the previous six weeks didn’t mean anything at all. I would feel annoyed, close the app, and delete it by the end of the week.

That happened enough times that I eventually stopped blaming myself and started looking at the tool.

Because here is the part I could never reconcile.

I had not actually lost the habit. I was still, in every way that mattered, someone who did that thing most days. The only thing that had gone to zero was a number in an app, and when the number went, it took the motivation with it.

That is a strange sort of failure for something built to motivate you.

So I built the one I wanted instead. Two months of evenings and weekends, my first app, and I am not a developer by trade.

Here is what I believe, in case any of it sounds like you.

On what a habit actually is

Most habit apps are built on the assumption that the job is recording. You did the thing, tap the box, here is a chart of the boxes.

I think recording is the least interesting part.

The real job is moving a behaviour from new to you to part of you, and those are completely different states. In the first, you need reminding, deciding, a little persuasion every time. In the second, you need nothing at all, because it has stopped being a decision. It has become second nature to you.

That transition is the whole product. Everything in Loma points at it.

Researchers at University College London followed people forming real habits and found that automaticity took a median of 66 days, with individuals landing anywhere between 18 and 254. I find the range more useful than the median. It says the distance is long, it is wildly different for everyone, and you cannot know in advance which sort of person you are going to be.

So my idea was to use a climbing metaphor for habit building. Every climb has a base camp and more camps along the way for the hiker to rest and recharge at.

This is why Loma is a hill. Each repetition moves your marker further up a hill. There are camps along the ridge. The summit is not a score. It is the point where the habit has stopped being something you track and started being something you are.

On streaks, and why Loma still counts

I want to be careful here, because a lot of apps in this category have decided that streaks are evil and their users are victims. I do not think that.

Streaks work. The counter going up genuinely feels good. The reluctance to break a run is a real force and it has carried plenty of people through the hard middle stretch of something worth doing. If that is you, I am not going to tell you that you have been doing it wrong.

My problem was never the counter. It was the cliff underneath it.

So Loma keeps the part that works. There is still a tally and it still goes up. Missing still costs you something, because if it cost you nothing the number would mean nothing and you would know it.

What Loma changes is the size of the fall. You slide back a little, not all the way. And the camps along the ridge are floors: once you have reached one, you cannot drop below it, however long you disappear.

A floor instead of a cliff. That is more or less the entire idea.

“Missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process.”

Lally et al. (2010), European Journal of Social Psychology.

The effect, for me at least, was that I stopped being afraid of the app. I could look at a bad week honestly instead of avoiding it, and a tool you are not avoiding is a tool that still works on day 200. Which is why I believe Loma’s approach is better in the long run than a pure streak counter.

On joy, and why software should be pleasant

A smaller confession. Even when the trackers worked, I never enjoyed opening them.

They were competent. Clean, quick, sensible. They were also just lists with checkboxes, and I opened them the way you open a form. Tap, tap, close.

Nothing about being in there made me want to come back, so the only thing keeping me there was discipline, and discipline is precisely the thing in short supply for someone trying to build a habit.

I think that is a design failure, and a strange one, because this is software you are meant to open every day for months. Daily things should be pleasant to be in. It seems obvious written down, and almost nobody in this category (maybe except for Not Boring Habits) behaves as though it is true.

So Loma has a sky. Dawn is dawn, dusk is dusk, the stars come out when they come out. Clouds drift, light shifts, sometimes a rain cloud joins the others, and every so often something crosses it: an airliner pulling a contrail, an airship, sky lanterns, light breaking through clouds.

You can tap the sky to see what else will spawn.

None of this makes you more productive. I want to be completely clear about that. It is decoration, and it is meant to be.

But it makes the app worth opening, and in something you use every day, worth opening and useful turn out to be the same thing.

On how software should be sold

At some point I had to decide what to charge, and this is where I got stubborn.

I pay monthly for several apps that have not meaningfully changed in years. That subscription is not buying me improvement. It is buying me continued access to something I already have, which is a different transaction wearing the same clothes. I have had enough of it, and I do not think I am alone.

So Loma is $9.99, once. That is the entire transaction.

The free version is properly free, not a demo. Two habits, reminders, dark mode, and your data exportable to CSV whenever you like. That last one is deliberate. Your habits should not be hostage to my business model, and you should be able to leave with everything.

Software used to be sold this way. I think it can be again, and I would like Loma to be a small argument for that.

On what you can actually hold me to

“No subscription” is an easy thing to say. It is worth being specific about what it commits me to.

Loma works offline, with no account and no sign-up. There is no server that can go down and take your habits with it, because there is no server. Your data sits on your phone. iCloud Drive backup exists if you want it and stays off until you turn it on, so that deleting the app is not the same as losing everything. And even when you turn it on, the copy goes to your iCloud Drive, which is an Apple service, not mine.

I intend to work on this for a long time. But I am one person with a day job, and it would be dishonest to promise indefinite maintenance in the confident tone people usually use for that. So here is the version I can stand behind: whatever happens to me or to my enthusiasm, the app you bought keeps working, and your data comes out in a format you can read without me.

That is the floor. I would rather give you a real floor than a large promise.

On doing this in the evenings

Loma is not a company. It is one person in London, working after hours, with considerably more enthusiasm than free time.

That means some things will be slower than you would like. It also means there is nobody between you and the person who made it. If you write to me, I am the one who reads it, and if you are right about something, I will change it.

Right now Loma is in beta, and this is the part where I ask you for something.

Charging once instead of forever means it has to be genuinely good on the day it ships, and so far it has only ever been used by me. What I would most like to know is how it feels on a real device after a week of properly living with it: the motion, the haptics, the reminders, whether the sky is as good to be around as I think it is.

Everyone who tests it keeps Loma Plus, free, for good, as a thank you. That seems only fair.

Yalin
London
August 2026