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Hooks is a flexible, privacy-first habit tracker for iPhone and iPad. It adapts to how you actually live, daily, weekly, monthly, or on your own schedule, and never asks for an account, an internet connection, or your data. These docs cover every screen, feature, and setting in the app.

About Hooks

Hooks helps you build and maintain habits by letting you define what “doing the habit” means and how often it should happen.

Every habit, logged entry, task, and setting lives only in local storage on your device. The only network-adjacent feature is reading from Apple Health, and that happens entirely on-device.

Core Concepts

Every habit is built from the same set of building blocks:

  • Name: what the habit is called
  • Start date: when it becomes active
  • Schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, specific weekdays, or a custom interval
  • Goal type: a simple check, a number, a duration, or an Apple Health metric
  • Progression (optional): for count/duration habits, a goal that automatically increases over time
  • Reminders (optional): one or more times of day

Separately, Hooks offers a lightweight task list for one-off to-dos that don’t need recurring, streak-style tracking.

Today Screen

The Today screen is the home of the app, shown every time you open Hooks. It lists all habits scheduled for the currently selected date, grouped into Daily, Weekly, and Monthly sections. Tapping the date title opens a calendar picker to jump to any past or future day; a reset button snaps back to today.

If Tasks are enabled in Settings, a Tasks section appears above the habits, with an inline field to add a new one. If Vacation Mode is on, a dedicated screen replaces the habit list entirely.

The toolbar menu gives access to Reorder, Profile, and Settings. The add button opens the new-habit form.

Quick actions on each habit row

Action How Applies to
Mark complete / undo Tap the checkbox, or swipe right All types except Apple Health
Log a custom amount Swipe right, then tap the number button Count & Duration only
Edit Swipe left, then tap the gear icon All types
Delete Swipe left, then tap the trash icon All types
Start/stop timer Tap the play/stop icon on the row Duration only

Apple Health habits have no manual controls on the row; progress is read from Health data automatically.

Duration habits carry a built-in stopwatch on the row: start it when you begin, stop it when you’re done, and the elapsed time logs automatically, even across app restarts.

Where finished habits land on the list (hidden, moved down, or left in place) is controlled by the When Completed setting (see Settings).

Creating Habits

Tap the add button on Today, or the gear icon on an existing row, to open the habit form.

  • Details: name, start date, and frequency
  • Goal: type (Check, Count, Duration, or Apple Health), its target, and optional progression
  • Reminders: a notification toggle and any number of specific times

What locks once you’re editing an existing habit. The schedule (frequency, weekdays, interval) locks once a habit exists, since changing it afterward would make past completion-rate stats inconsistent. To use a different schedule, delete the habit and recreate it. Everything else, including the goal and reminders, stays editable at any time.

Habit Goals

Hooks supports four kinds of goals.

Check. Plain done/not-done for the current period. Tap to complete, tap again to undo. Good for habits like meditating or making the bed. Cannot use progression.

Count. A numeric target with an optional unit: 10 pages, 3 sets, 2 liters. Tap to add one unit, or log a specific number at once. Entries within the same period sum toward the target.

Duration. A time-based goal in minutes. Use the built-in stopwatch to time yourself live, or log time manually. Multiple sessions in the same period add up.

Apple Health. A goal backed by Health data: Steps, Active Calories, or Sleep. Hooks reads the metric automatically and marks the habit complete once the target is hit. There’s no manual input, since the value always reflects live Health data. See Apple Health. Cannot use progression.

Scheduling

Five frequency types are available when creating a habit:

  • Daily: every day
  • Weekly: a target count you choose, due within each calendar week
  • Monthly: a target count you choose, due within each calendar month
  • Weekday: specific days (e.g. Mon/Wed/Fri), optionally repeating only every 2nd-52nd week
  • Interval: every 2-99 days, weeks, or months, counted from the start date

Interval and Weekday habits are grouped by their underlying unit: an “every 3 days” habit appears with Daily habits, an “every 2 weeks” habit with Weekly ones.

Tracking Progress

Each goal type logs progress in its own way: tap to complete a Check, add to a Count, run the timer for a Duration, or let Apple Health update automatically.

Progress for the current period can be reset at any time on non-Health habits, via the leading swipe on Today or the Reset option in a habit’s detail menu. This deletes entries within that period only; other periods and overall stats are untouched.

Habit Progression

For Count and Duration habits designed to increase over time (progressive-overload workouts, for example), enable Progression in the habit form.

  • Increase: the step size added to the goal each time it advances
  • Trigger: Automatic (every period), Interval (every N periods), or Completion (only periods where the goal was hit)
  • Maximum (optional): a cap the goal will never exceed

Progression is not available for Check or Apple Health goals, since neither has a numeric target to scale.

Reminders

Each habit can carry any number of daily reminder times, added and removed individually in its form. Enabling a reminder prompts iOS for notification permission the first time; declining leaves reminders off until you allow it in Settings.

The Notifications toggle in Settings is a global switch: turning it off cancels every pending reminder immediately. Pausing a habit, or turning on Vacation Mode, cancels its reminders too.

All notifications are scheduled locally on the device; Hooks has no server and sends nothing over the network.

Vacation Mode

Life happens. Hooks makes it easy to step away without breaking your stats or getting unwanted reminders.

Pausing a single habit. Available from a habit’s detail-view menu, or by swiping a habit in the Habits list under Profile. A paused habit disappears from Today, is excluded from completion-rate calculations, and has its reminders cancelled until resumed.

Vacation Mode. A single toggle in Settings. Turning it on immediately pauses every habit and cancels every reminder; Today switches to a dedicated vacation screen. Turning it off resumes everything that wasn’t paused individually beforehand.

Reordering Habits

Open Reorder from Today’s toolbar menu to drag habits within each Daily/Weekly/Monthly group. A reset button instantly re-sorts every group alphabetically. The new order applies everywhere habits are listed: Today, Reorder, and the Habits list under Profile.

Habit Details

Tap a habit’s name to open its detail view.

  • Check: a due/completed toggle plus a progress bar
  • Count / Duration: a plus/minus stepper plus a progress bar
  • Apple Health: a read-only progress bar and a button that opens the Apple Health app

Stats shown: Completed (total completions as of the selected date), Completion Rate (percentage of scheduled periods completed since the start date), and Total (lifetime sum of everything logged).

The detail-view menu also offers edit, pause/resume, reset, and delete; deleting a habit removes all its logged history too, with a confirmation prompt first.

Managing Habits

In Profile, tapping the Habits row opens every habit, split into Scheduled and Paused. Each row can be swiped to pause/resume or to delete/edit; it’s the fastest way to see and manage every habit at once.

Profile & Stats

The Profile screen, opened from Today’s toolbar menu, is the habit-tracking dashboard:

  • Habits: counts of scheduled and paused habits, plus the link to the full list
  • Successes: a twelve-month bar chart of monthly success score, lifetime completion total, and best month
  • Consistency: your most and least consistent habits by completion rate

Daily Tasks

A simple, optional list for one-off items that don’t need recurring tracking: calling the dentist, buying groceries.

Tasks are tied to a specific date and only appear on Today when that date is selected. Tapping the circle marks a task done or undone; swiping right moves it to a different date, swiping left deletes it. Turning the feature off in Settings hides the section but keeps existing tasks.

Tasks are intentionally separate from the habit system: no schedule, no goal type, no completion-rate stats, just a name, a date, and a done flag.

Apple Health

Hooks can read data directly from Apple Health to auto-track certain habits, entirely locally.

Metric Unit
Steps steps
Active Calories kcal
Sleep h:mm

Access is read-only, always. Hooks never writes to Apple Health and never sends Health data off the device. The first time a habit’s type is set to Apple Health, Hooks requests permission to read that metric; declining just means the habit won’t update.

Once a Health habit’s live value hits its target for today, Hooks logs a completion automatically, so its history and stats populate like any other habit without a single tap.

Settings

Everything configurable lives in one screen, opened from Today’s toolbar menu.

Hooks

Setting Effect
Haptic Feedback Tactile feedback on completions.
Notifications Master switch for reminders.
Tasks Shows or hides the Tasks section on Today.
Vacation Mode Pauses every habit and cancels every reminder. See Vacation Mode.
When Completed Controls whether finished habits and tasks are hidden, moved to the end, or left in place.

Other

Item Effect
Privacy In-app privacy policy, in German and English.
Imprint Legal notice with provider and contact details.
Reset Data Permanently deletes every habit, entry, and task, after a confirmation prompt. Settings and permissions are untouched.

Privacy & Data

Hooks is built to be completely offline and private by design.

There is no account, no cloud sync, and no analytics, ads, telemetry, crash reporting, or third-party SDKs. Habits, entries, and tasks are stored locally on your device; none of it is ever transmitted. Apple Health access is read-only and processed on-device only. Deleting the app removes all locally stored data through iOS’s standard uninstall process.

The full legal privacy policy, available in German and English, covers the GDPR basis for each point above along with your rights as a data subject.

This guide reflects the current feature set of Hooks (version 1.0).

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