About Zen - Habits

Zen - Habits is a habit tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. You set a habit, choose when it repeats, and complete it from whichever device is in your hand. Over time the app shows how your consistency is actually changing, rather than reducing everything to a streak you are afraid to break.

What it is

Zen is local-first. Every habit, completion, daily note, and reminder is written to a database on your own device, and the app works with no network at all. Personal sync across your Apple devices is optional and runs through your own iCloud. Challenges, the one shared feature, are opt-in and run over Apple CloudKit sharing between the people you invite.

There are no Zen accounts, no sign-in, no email address, no analytics SDKs, and no advertising. There is no Donado Labs server holding your habits, because there is no Donado Labs server at all. The one third-party service the app ever contacts is Expo's push service, and only if you join a Challenge and allow notifications: that is why the App Store privacy labels declare a device identifier and a name under "Data Not Linked to You". The full account is on the privacy page at https://zen.donado.co/privacy. Everything you record can be exported as a JSONL file, one JSON object per line, whenever you want it.

Zen is a one-time purchase on the App Store. There is no subscription, no free-to-annoy tier, and no upsell inside the app.

Who makes it

Zen - Habits is made by Donado Labs, a small independent software studio. Donado Labs builds native Apple apps that respect the device they run on: system fonts, system behaviours, no gamification, and no analytics or advertising SDKs. You can read more at https://donado.co.

How it is built

Zen is a native iOS app. The source of truth is an on-device SQLite database; reads and writes never wait on a network. Widgets, the Apple Watch app, and Live Activities read that same local state, so the number on your Home Screen and the number in the app cannot disagree. Reminders are local notifications scheduled on the device, never messages pushed to it from a server.

Contact

Support, questions, bug reports, and privacy questions all go to support@donado.co. See https://zen.donado.co/contact.