Simple tools, no accounts, no clutter

Three of these do the same job for different substances, and the reasonable question is why they are not one app with a dropdown at the top.

The first reason is that the timelines are not the same shape. Caffeine clears in hours and the hard part is a few days of headaches. Nicotine's worst stretch is measured in days and the cravings outlast it by months. A cannabis tolerance break is measured in weeks, and how long it takes depends on how much was in your system to begin with. An app that tried to be all three at once would end up vague about all three, and vague is the one thing a countdown cannot afford to be.

The second reason is more practical. Someone cutting back on coffee should not have to install something with a cannabis leaf on the icon, and someone quitting vapes should not have to scroll past features that have nothing to do with them. Separate apps mean each one can say exactly what it is on the home screen and nothing else.

They do share an engine underneath. A fix to how a streak survives a bad day, or to how the recovery curve handles a slip, gets made once and rolls out to all three. That is why they tend to update within days of each other.

No account, ever. There is no sign-up screen, no email field and no password. You open the app and start. This is not a feature I am saving for later; there is nothing to sign into because there is no server to sign into.

Your data stays on the phone. What you log is written to your device and read back from your device. It is not uploaded, synced or analysed, which is also why losing the phone loses the history — an honest trade I would rather state plainly than hide.

They work with no signal. On a plane, in a basement, with the phone in airplane mode: the timers still run and the history still opens.

Nothing is a subscription. Where there is something to buy it is a one-time unlock that stays unlocked. I am not going to charge you every year to keep looking at your own data.

The privacy policies spell out the specifics for each app, and they are short, because there is not much to disclose.

Coffee, energy drinks or pre-workout, and you want to know when the headaches stop: Caffeine Break Buddy. Cigarettes, vapes, pouches or dip: Nicotine Break Buddy. A cannabis tolerance break, especially one with a date you need to be clear by: THC Break Buddy.

And if you are not cutting back on anything and just want something to poke at on a break, Tiny Dragon Hoard is a cozy idle game about dragons filling a treasury, which is a different kind of useful.