Streaks is famous, even among habit trackers, for being simple. Open the app, tap today’s habit, watch your streak tick up by one day.
That’s the whole interaction, and that simplicity is exactly the point: for plenty of people, it’s genuinely all they need.
Retic keeps that same simplicity, but takes a different approach on two fronts: how habits get measured, and how habits connect to goals.
What Streaks is good at
Streaks’ strength is near-zero friction. Create a habit, check it off daily, keep the streak alive. Nothing else to think about.
Capping you at 12 habits is a deliberate choice in service of that same simplicity: instead of tempting you to track more and more, it keeps you managing only as much as you can realistically sustain.
Crunchy Bagel, the team behind Streaks, has described this cap as an intentional design choice rather than a technical limitation.
Where the difference shows up in habit tracking
As of a June 2026 review, Streaks is optimized purely for recording done-or-not with a single tap, with no hierarchical goal structure and no automatic progress calculation on completion.
A habit like “drink 2L of water,” which needs a number to actually feel real, and a habit like “no late-night snacking,” which is only kept by not doing something, both get flattened into the same single checkmark.
And no matter how consistently you keep a habit, there’s no way inside the app to see which bigger goal it’s actually feeding into.
How long a habit takes to become automatic also varies a lot.
Psychologist Phillippa Lally’s 2010 UCL study (European Journal of Social Psychology) found it took an average of 66 days for a habit to stick, ranging from 18 to as many as 254 days.
With that much variance, plenty of habits simply don’t fit a single checkmark applied the same way to everything.
| Streaks | Retic | |
|---|---|---|
| Hierarchical goal structure | ✕ | ✓ |
| Habit tracking | ✓ (check-off only, max 12) | ✓ (check-off, numeric, avoidance) |
| Automatic progress on completion | ✕ | ✓ |
| Habit count limit | Max 12 | None |
| Platform | iOS, watchOS only | Web (mobile browsers too) |
| Simplicity | ✓✓ | ✓ |
Based on a review conducted in June 2026. The competitive landscape is reviewed on an ongoing basis.
In Retic, you can record a habit as check-off, numeric, or avoidance, whichever shape actually fits it, and nest it under a goal, so every completion automatically moves that goal’s progress forward.
Keep up the “drink water” habit, and you can literally watch a goal like “build a hydration habit this month” fill in as a result.
NOTE Doing it on an off day doesn’t push the streak number up
A streak only counts the days a habit is actually scheduled for, so doing it voluntarily on a rest day won’t run the number up early. That day’s effort is still credited separately, which keeps the rhythm you set intact without letting the extra day vanish from the record.
What happens once you pass 12 habits in Streaks
Once you’re past 12 habits in Streaks, your only real option is to drop a lower-priority one or start running a separate notes app or checklist alongside it.
The app itself has no way to group habits by area of life or rank them by priority, so deciding which of the 12 to keep is entirely on you.
Once you care about even three or four life areas, health, career, relationships, hobbies, you can hit 12 fast even at three or four habits per area.
The cap itself is a deliberate design choice, as noted earlier, but it also means that once you genuinely need more habits than that, you end up managing a second list outside the app, and splitting your tracking across two places is exactly how one of them ends up out of date.
Can you use Streaks outside of iOS
No. Streaks is a native iOS and watchOS app only, with no way to access it from an Android device or a desktop web browser.
Instead of building an experience that lives entirely inside iPhone and Apple Watch, the moment you step outside that platform, your habit record simply stops.
If you want to check habits together with a partner or family member and one of you is on Android, there’s no way to do that inside Streaks alone.
Retic, being web-based, just needs a browser, works the same on mobile browsers, and doesn’t care what operating system you’re on.
Checking in briefly from a work computer, or switching to a non-iPhone device, doesn’t break the streak the way locking everything into one platform does.
TIP Add it to your home screen and use it like a native app
Even though Retic runs in the browser, using “Add to Home Screen” on a mobile browser gives it its own icon and opens it in a standalone window, no address bar in sight. That works the same way on Android and iPhone, so it feels close to a native app either way.
So which should you use
If you want the extreme, check-and-done simplicity of Streaks and don’t need habits tied to any bigger goal, that approach still holds up well.
But if you want to measure different habits in different ways, or want to actually see which goal a habit is ultimately feeding into, having that connection happen automatically tends to last longer.
Think about how many habits you’re actually tracking right now, and whether you could immediately name which goal each one feeds into, and the choice usually becomes clear.
Curious about hierarchical goal structure itself? Our Retic vs Notion comparison covers that.
Curious about gamified motivation instead? Check out our Retic vs Habitica comparison.