Way of Life App Alternative: What to Use When the Red Days Keep Coming

Way of Life is one of the oldest habit trackers on the App Store, and one of the most honest about how it works. Its listing describes the whole method in one line: "Mark each day green or red, keep your chains going, and watch your progress over weeks, months, and years." On the US storefront on 11 October 2026 it was rated 4.82 from 5,280 ratings. People rarely leave Way of Life because it hides the truth. They leave because it showed the truth very clearly, one habit turned into a column of red days, and the colour was the only thing that changed.

This page is for that situation. It is not a list of twenty apps. It explains what Way of Life is built to do, when it is still the right choice, and what to look for if what you actually need is help on the day after a red one.

What Way of Life is built to do

Way of Life is built around awareness. The listing puts it plainly: "Changing habits is hard. Seeing them clearly makes it easier." You answer each habit with a tap, green for done and red for not, and after a few weeks "patterns start to appear". It invites you to "Track anything that matters to you", good habits and bad ones, and promises it takes "less than a minute a day."

Around that grid the listing names chains ("challenge yourself not to break a streak"), pie charts and bar graphs with trend lines, a scoreboard with "instant weekly and monthly feedback", notes for "what went well, or what didn't", flexible reminders, tags, widgets, Siri and Shortcuts, themes, a colour-blind mode, a passcode or Face ID lock and export as CSV, Excel or JSON. Its pricing is simple too: "Premium simply unlocks unlimited habits."

What the listing does not describe is what happens to a habit after a red day, or whether the app changes your plan when the same habit keeps turning red. A red day is recorded and shows up in the chain, the chart and the scoreboard; the tools it names for acting on that are your own notes and reminders.

Why seeing the red is not the same as fixing it

Seeing your behaviour clearly does help. Harkin and colleagues (2016) pooled 138 studies and found that monitoring progress toward a goal reliably improves the chance of reaching it. But a red square only answers whether you did it. It does not say whether the cause was time, energy, place or a week that had no room for the habit, and that cause is what decides what you should do tomorrow.

The step that turns awareness into change is a plan for the specific obstacle. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) combined 94 tests of "if-then" plans, where you decide in advance what you will do when a situation arrives, and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals. Habits themselves are built by repeating the same behaviour in the same context: Lally and colleagues (2010) found a median of 66 days to automaticity, with a range from 18 to 254, and missing one opportunity did not materially affect the outcome. One red day is not the problem. A plan that was built for your old week and never rebuilt for the new one is.

What often follows a visible run of red is the abstinence violation effect (Marlatt and Gordon, 1985), or the "what the hell" effect (Cochran and Tesser, 1996): once the record shows the chain is broken, the next lapse feels cheaper. So if your Way of Life grid shows one habit turning red while the others stay green, the diagnosis is usually not "I need to look harder". It is that the habit needs a different plan, and nobody has asked what got in the way.

When Way of Life is still the right choice

Switching apps is not always the answer. Stay with Way of Life, or go back to it, if any of these describe you:

• You want to see many habits at a glance. A green and red grid across weeks, months and years is exactly what Way of Life is designed for. BeMooore tracks one habit and nothing else.
• You want to cut something down as well as build something. The listing gives examples like drinking less alcohol or soda and cutting back on sugar.
• You care about privacy and your data. Way of Life says it does not sell or share your data, lets you lock the app and exports to CSV, Excel or JSON. BeMooore has no data export.
• You want charts, trend lines and automation. Charts, a scoreboard, widgets, Siri, Shortcuts and URL schemes are all part of Way of Life.
• Your grid is mostly green. If your habits are sticking, the right number of apps to change is zero.

What to look for in an alternative

If the problem was one habit that kept turning red when your week changed, another tracker with nicer colours or more charts will show you the same red in more detail. Filter on what the app does after a miss, not on how well it records it:

If your last app was Streaks, see our Streaks app alternative guide; if it was a game that takes health points, the Habitica alternative guide; if an all-in-one routine became too much, the Fabulous alternative guide; if a polished tracker recorded your skips but nothing changed, the Habitify alternative guide; if a chain of perfect days broke, the Productive app alternative guide; if a self-care pet kept you busy but one habit never stuck, the Finch app alternative guide; if you know the Atomic Habits method and the habit still slipped, the Atoms app alternative guide; and if your charts showed the slide but nothing changed, the Strides app alternative guide. The apps side by side are in the best habit tracker app, by the reason you quit the last one.

BeMooore: one habit and a mentor that changes the plan after a red day

BeMooore is deliberately narrower than Way of Life. It does not give you a grid of many habits; it is built around one habit and what happens after you miss it. Its App Store listing opens with the problem: "Miss one day and everything resets to zero. That is why most habit apps stop working after week two." What the listing says the app does instead:

• "Missed days do not wipe your progress. No streak shaming, no starting over."
• "An AI mentor that asks what got in the way and adjusts the plan, instead of sending another reminder."
• "Routines that flex around real life: sick days, travel, bad weeks."
• It is made for people who have quit habit trackers before, including people with ADHD whose attention does not run on a schedule.

The suggested start: pick one habit that matters this month, log it with one tap, and when you slip, let the app ask what got in the way and rebuild the plan with you. Where Way of Life shows you a red day, BeMooore is built for the conversation about why it was red and what tomorrow should look like.

Where it is weaker than Way of Life, honestly: it has no multi-habit grid, no charts, trend lines or scoreboard, no data export, no Siri, Shortcuts or URL schemes, no themes and no track record going back to 2010. It is built for one habit rather than many, it has no public rating history yet, and it is iOS only. The BeMooore download is free and the paid plan starts with a 1-week free trial that you can cancel in Settings. Some people use both: Way of Life for the full picture, BeMooore for the one habit that keeps turning red.

Whatever you choose, plan for the red day

Any app, Way of Life included, works better with one ritual it cannot do for you: deciding in advance what you will do the day after a miss. Three rules help more than any app choice:

One habit first. Pick the habit that matters most and answer it first each day, before the easy green ones.

Never miss twice, with a written tiny version. One red day is noise. Write down now what the two-minute version of the habit is, so the day after a miss has a plan instead of a decision. That is an if-then plan: "if yesterday was red, today I do the two-minute version".

Name the cause of every red day. Way of Life has notes; use them. Write one line: time, energy, place or forgot. After three weeks the pattern is usually obvious, and you can change when and where the habit happens. More on choosing an anchor in morning rituals, and on how habits form in habit formation and change. The case for dropping streak pressure entirely is in habit trackers without streaks, and nine iOS trackers are compared on exactly this point in our missed-day comparison.

Frequently asked questions

References

• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229.
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
• Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon, J. R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors. Guilford Press.
• Cochran, W., & Tesser, A. (1996). The "what the hell" effect: Some effects of goal proximity and goal framing on performance. In L. L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-Regulation. Erlbaum.
• Apple Inc. iTunes Lookup API, US storefront: Way of Life - Habit Tracker (id393159800) and BeMooore (id6505137869), retrieved 11 October 2026.