Millennials’ interest in self-care has helped to fuel an entirely new market for mobile apps focused on health and wellness. Last year alone, the top 10 meditation apps pulled in $195 million — a 52% increase from 2018, for example. A newcomer to the self-care app market is Tangerine, an app that focuses on habit and mood tracking with the goal of offering users a way to better organize their routines and achieve personal goals.
According to Tangerine’s creator Pedro Marques, he and fellow co-founder Raphael Cruzeiro built the app in their free time over the past seven months or so.
“We realized that people, in general, tend to feel better and happier when they actually have a healthier, organized routine. So building an app that would combine habit and mood tracking seemed like something that could work out,” explains Marques, of how they got started. “At the end of the day, we not only want to help people be more productive, but also more conscious, grateful and reflective of their life.”
Mood-tracking apps are already commonplace across today’s App Store, thanks to the self-care app boom. However, many apps focus mainly only on allowing users to record their moods, often with a simple emoji. The app would then derive certain insights from the user’s emotional-state history over time. Tangerine, on the other hand, aims to better connect how someone’s daily routine impacts how they’ve been feeling.
Your goal may be to exercise more, eat healthier or meditate daily, perhaps. Or you may want to learn something new — like a new language or how to code. Or perhaps your aim is to improve your relationships with family, friends and loved ones. But making a commitment to change your behavior or to fit new activities into your day’s routine can be difficult. While alerts and reminders can help you to remember you’re supposed to do a certain activity, they don’t help to motivate you to do so.
Tangerine aims to be the extra push of encouragement you need and gives you the ability to reflect on your day, which the team believes is in itself a powerful motivator. The end result is an app that combines habit tracking, journaling and mood tracking to offer an improved set of insights over mood tracking alone.
For example, Tangerine may be able to tell you things like “When your days were awesome, you completed X habits per day on average.” You can also see your completion rate broken down over time, your current streak, longest streak, a mood graph and more.
Soon, the app plans to add integration with the iOS Health app so you’ll be able to tie these insights with other health data — like your exercise schedule or sleep cycle. That way you’ll see if completing your habits helped you sleep better, or you had a better work week when you made time to exercise, among other things.
But what makes Tangerine stand out isn’t just its feature set alone. The app’s design is compelling, as well. It’s simple, but polished in a way that you don’t always see from a scrappy side project built by a team of two.
Tangerine launched in mid-January and in less than a month has seen around 15,000 downloads and 2,000 daily active users. The app is currently bootstrapped and monetizes through subscriptions for premium features ($4.99/mo or $29.99/year). Because the app is still new, most subscribers are still on free trials for now. Over time, Tangerine aims to expand the premium feature set to make subscription conversions more compelling.
The self-care app market today is led by meditation apps, like Calm and Headspace, but many other top apps also offer mood tracking, mindfulness, journaling and other self-care activities. For example, the No. 10 most-downloaded self-care app of 2019, Sanity & Self, offers audio programs, reminders, and journaling, and No. 8 app Aura includes a mood tracker, life coaching service and community features.
As the market continues to grow, there’s room for more variety than just apps focused on meditation alone.
Tangerine is available today for iOS, but an Android version is planned for later this year.
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