Trialo: Habit Experiments

About Trialo: Habit Experiments

You read that cutting caffeine after 2pm helps you sleep. You try it. Three weeks later you have no idea whether it did anything: you also started going to bed earlier, and the weather turned.

Trialo exists to find out whether it actually worked.

HOW IT WORKS
1. Rate a thing or two once a day, in about four seconds: sleep, energy, focus, mood, whatever matters to you.
2. Start a habit on top of it: a fixed end date, a box to tick each day, the outcomes it is meant to move.
3. On the last day, Trialo compares the trial against the fortnight before it started, next to your day-to-day swing, and says which is bigger.

Often the answer is that you cannot tell. Trialo says so instead of drawing you a green arrow.

TWO COMPARISONS, NOT ONE

Ticking the box every day buys a second reading. Trialo also compares the days you did it against the days you did not, inside the same three weeks: the season, the workload and the head cold sit on both sides, so that one is not confounded by time. Where the two disagree, Trialo says so rather than picking the flattering one.

Most trackers compare a change's first week against its last, which cannot separate it from time passing. Rating every day means the before picture is there on day one.

RUN MORE THAN ONE

Two habits on different outcomes read perfectly well. Two on the same outcome cannot be untangled by any comparison, so rather than forbid it, Trialo names the overlap on the verdict: "A 20-minute walk after dinner was running for 21 of these days too."

KEEP IT OR STOP

Every trial ends in a decision, not a score. Keep it and it stays on your list with no end date. Stop it and it goes to the archive with its numbers and your note. Either way the record keeps how long it lasted, a number a habit tracker never has.

A fortnight after you keep something, Trialo offers to take it away again and watch whether the effect goes with it. If it does not follow, something else was doing the work.

22 CHANGES TO TRY

Behaviours and timings only, searchable and by category: no caffeine after 14:00, no work email after 19:00. Each says what counts as done, what could ruin it, and how long to give it. Trialo never suggests a supplement, a dose or a protocol. Whether any of them work is what you are finding out.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
• No streaks. A day you did not rate is a blank square, not a failure
• No feed, no badges
• One reminder, off until you switch it on, quiet on days you have answered
• A day you were ill, travelling or at a wedding can be excused: neither a success nor a miss

The verdict will not tell you what to conclude. Keep and Stop are the same size, and the note you write is the part you will use in a year.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• No account, no sign up, no analytics, no crash reports, no ads
• Everything you enter stays in the app's private storage on your device
• Trialo has no networking code of its own
• Google Play Billing is the one part that reaches the network, only to check the unlock is still owned

FREE AND PRO
Free: the daily rating, two trials at once, as many kept habits as you like, both comparisons, the reversal check, every idea, the widget you tick and rate from, and your whole archive.

Pro, a one-time purchase, not a subscription:
• Track more than three outcomes at once
• Run more than two trials at once
• Set up each widget: what is in it, what it answers, how it looks
• A true black theme for OLED screens and Material You colours

The three outcome limit is deliberate: every outcome is another question every day, and the app people give up on is the one that opened with six. Two trials at once is the same argument.

The free tier limits what the app asks of you each day, never what it remembers or says. Every verdict, note and chart stays free, and a started trial always finishes.

Trialo is not a medical device and gives no medical advice.