I wouldn’t call this a professional tech review, but I wanted to get my thoughts down for the Finch app. This post captures the experience and benefits of using this app via my reflection after 2 ½ years of use.
Content
Finch self-care app: the reviews
Google Play reviews vary: Some people thought it was too demanding and not relaxed enough, but others, like me, find it vital to their self-care support system.
At the time of writing this post in June 2024, the people provided negative feedback on recent updates which were visually overwhelming and too flashy (agreed), pushing some people to leave the app entirely. They recently added a daily streak feature to help with motivation that has gotten a lot of poor reviews because many users find daily streak pressures to be more authoritative than helpful.
When I first got on this app many things were (and still are) customizable; you could turn features, pages/screens, goals, etc., on/off as needed to accommodate the app to your specific needs. I hope the developers will keep that spirit going. Nothing worse than an app that decides for you how to do best. Self-care maintenance is an individual need. I haven’t hit these blockers yet but I have left long-term services before for suddenly introducing “science-backed features” that destroyed my entire system and purpose of using the app, and it is devastating.
It’s almost dangerous to start a mental health app and the Finch team hopefully takes that responsibility with gravity. This app is part of its users mental health strategy. You can sit in a conference room and discuss upgrades and new features, but hold a place in that room for all the users who rely on your app’s consistent and reliable experience as they use it as part of their care routines.
A user journey
It’s Saturday night. Waffles and Misty the Flamingo are exploring NYC after resting in the apartment while I charged them for the adventure. I get 5 energy (⚡︎) per completed goal and have to get up to 35⚡︎ to start the adventure. For every additional 5⚡︎ I gain from completing goals after Waffles departs, they come back earlier. You can also earn 2-5⚡︎ for non-goal interactions around the app, such as logging your mood, your motivation for the upcoming day (morning), how you felt about the day (evening), interacting with friends, and so on.
I just earned Misty after completing today’s missions. It’s 8:30pm and the moon is low on the screen as Waffles and Misty walk. Waffles is wearing the outfit I made them, holding a progress flag in celebration of Pride month. Misty, a small gray flamingo, elegantly steps beside them as they traverse the NYC skyline.
We are adventuring NYC and making discoveries along the way. We’ve explored 78% of it. So far in our journey together, Waffles has learned about the Burroughs of New York, Times Square, the New York pretzel, Central Park, Stuart Little, the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, New York pizza, Home Alone 2, Broadway, the Museum of Natural History, and gators in the sewers.
We have three more places, other than NYC, to discover and complete. We’ve already explored Waffles’ hometown, Finchie Forest, and set off across Tokyo, Paris, the Alps, Taipei, Reykjavik, the Serengeti, and more. Waffles and I are learning about all of these places together.
I fell asleep, then I woke up and made this video on Sunday morning. Normally it takes me all day to charge up and then I send Waffles out with their sidekick overnight, but while showing you how this app works, I charged my birb before 9am. Though you can set timed goals and reminders, the app is fairly flexible in how you use it (more on how I use it later).
Some days you may be more active than others. A daily streak reward encourages you to open and use the app daily, at least once. A monthly special event reward inspires you to complete between 2 and 7 goals* most days, enough to charge your finch to go on their adventure for 25 days so you can earn a new micropet sidekick. I earned Misty on June 29, so I know I had 4 days of rest from completing all daily goals.
*values adding up to 35⚡︎, so this may include interactions valued anywhere from 2 to 20⚡︎
Is a subscription needed? (No.)
Keeping in mind that individual use and app requirements will vary, here are my thoughts on whether you need to pay for this app to get any use out of it.
I’ve been using the Finch app for 2 years and 5 months. I paid the first two years but reset my subscriptions budgets this year to the bare minimum, only adding back on as needed. So far I am seeing many benefits to the premium version which I’m now lacking, but there are also unique benefits to keeping the free version.
Experience using premium, currently using free
Rewards: As you complete goals throughout the day to gain energy (⚡︎) for the adventure, you also have the potential to complete daily or special quests. Most of these reward with rainbow stones, the currency in the app. The quest options seem to be identical between the two account types, though the rewards differ.
With the premium version it’s very easy and quick to get items (clothes, homewares, feather colors, and places). That’s motivating because it makes it more fun to play. This is the type of app that you “play” by redecorating a home or re-outfitting your bird. As you collect micropets, you can choose a little buddy to accompany your finch. Otherwise, your interaction is focused mostly on tracking or reviewing progress.
It took me a few months to adjust to the art style, but everything is incredibly cute. As you travel you can get location-specific rewards and new items are released monthly with special events. You’re never going to like everything the app offers, but if you like 70% I think it’s worth continuing.
When you send your finch (mine is called Waffles) onto an adventure for the day you also win a themed event quest. Events change each month and tend to have seasonal themes. With the premium account you win two blocks of gifts per day, but with the free account you only win one block. This is one reason you get so much good stuff quickly with premium. There are more color options too!
With a free account, you have to wait for your desired items to appear in the shop in the color you want after the month is over. This is a pretty standard model for free/premium rewards in apps.
Guided self-care: Premium provides more options for making goals, setting up goal tracks, customization around the app, unlocks more built-in exercises, and provides other measures to help get you where you are trying to go faster. Since I had already set up my custom goal tracks while I was premium, I haven’t had to do much tweaking in the free version. I can’t speak much to that experience and how it differs between account types.
I use the breathing exercises, soundscapes, and timers, but I have enough custom reflections and activities that I don’t often use the other prompts and features. As a highly introspective person, I don’t need much assistance with creating self-care tracks, but someone with less experience might find the suggested goals more useful, and therefore a premium account would be more helpful.
When I had premium, I had a lot of success with customization; even something as small as editing the theme was helpful because the colors and visuals matter (for me). It’s not impossible without those extra features, though. I kept some customization coming from the paid subscription to the free version, so I’m not sure of the full experience free-only.
Having used the premium options before, I’d be more likely to subscribe again when I need to refresh my goals list. I usually refresh my goals about every few seasons (8-9 months). I’ve only had the free account for 3 months so we’ll see how that goes!
Micropets: The game also includes micropets, small friends that go with your finch on their adventures and also hang out with them in the apartment. You can get them for various reasons, but a new one comes each month as part of the special events. For premium accounts this happens at 20 days, and for free accounts at 25.
It’s nice to get that reward early, but in many ways this is a key feature that makes the free account substantially more meaningful in your goal achievements. You have to achieve 35⚡︎ via goals and interactions to adventure 25 days out of every month to get that monthly micropet. I found that with the premium account, I’d slack off after 20 days because once I got the cute sidekick, I felt like I won the month already.
Regardless, I like that this builds in days of rest. Where some of the Google Play reviewers saw the special event daily goal as a demand to rewards every day, I see it as a way to power through goals 25 days and leave the remaining days to rest. Resting days can be dispersed throughout the month or collected to be taken in chunks each month. I’ve only missed one micropet after taking more than 6 days of total no-phone rest one month, but I needed it.
Side note: The addition of micropets as a monthly reward has helped me achieve a pacing that daily/weekly goals couldn’t reach. As the application has evolved with new ideas, so have my goals and strategies to reach them. It’s very cool to intentionally use apps, not just as passive trackers but to see how you can evolve your internal processes over time, too.
Reporting: I use in-app reporting which is pretty complex and detailed for my needs. It has improved exponentially over the last 6 months and I’m still learning to tweak my use to provide the best results. Some recent improvements have brought the reporting options to an impressive spot and I’m still learning what I can do with the new visuals.
What I love most about this app is that you can either use suggested tags or control your own and use those to track patterns, correlations, and instances as time passes. I’ve been slowly building and categorizing my tag library. Tags live in goals and reflections so you can attach them to various input as you track progress.
If you know what you’re doing, you can export your data into spreadsheets and make all kinds of charts and graphs and things. (I’m not quite there yet, I’ll need some consistent data first.) There are more in-app reporting options for premium, but if you are a data non-enthusiast, you get more reporting than you know what to do with using the free account.
Trade-offs: The main trade-offs for me between free and premium appear to solely be between whether I want to collect all kinds of items in different colors, or if I’d prefer to focus on my goals. That in itself provides some flexibility. Sometimes I am too busy to care about my phone so I’m not getting on the app much, but I’ll maintain a daily streak. What if it’s Halloween? WHAT IF I’M MISSING OUT ON SPOOKY ITEMS? 
I understand the $9.99/monthly pricing, but if the app was $5/month I’d be more likely to subscribe on/off during the months I want to collect more items vs months I want to focus more strongly on goals and have time for consistent app interaction.
It’s only $39.99 ($3.33/month) a year, so it’s easy to jump in for that purchase; however, I’m earnestly trying to be intentional about my spending so I am no longer taking easy deals. I want this app to work for me and my self-care goals, not be a quick way to get cute shit.
Support and feedback
Normally when you read “support and feedback” what you think is technical support for use of the application, reporting bugs, and that kind of stuff. For Finch you have to shift your mindset a bit: support is part of the self-care benefit of this app. They have built a community for users of the app to come together and be kind to each other. You can also use this as a place to provide feedback on the app and you’ll find instructions on where to report bugs to the developers.
I have lurked to spend time immersing myself in the Discord, but haven’t visited recently and I’m no longer a member. Discord isn’t my thing, I’m not socially online enough to find it useful and it’s difficult to keep up with very active communities. I still think what Finch has built is very cool.
This is a key feature of the experience this app provides: an online home base for Finch users to connect about mental health, daily life, inspirations, their app use, and interact with the creators and developers. It’s a Discord community so it isn’t part of the app at all, but the community is centered around use of the app as well as self-care and connection. You don’t have to join or participate in the Discord for the Finch app to be useful, but if you are into Discord communities and need that flavor of support, I can see how it’d be quite effective.
How I use the app
Perhaps another time I’ll compose a doc explaining my full Finch strategy, but for today’s purposes I’ll keep this brief. I think a proper review should include some context on how the app is being used since everyone will use it in a different way.
My use of Finch has naturally evolved in the last 2 ½ years but today it helps by giving me a few rewards and a sense of accomplishment scattered throughout the day while I try to manage everything I have going on. I’m growing older, gaining more perspective on how to improve stuff, and I know how easy it is for me to lose track of the little things. Finch helps me keep track of all that.
I use this app to reward me for small wins throughout the day that could also be considered “spoons survival” tasks. On my high energy days, I can breeze through all of the goals without even thinking about it. At the end of the day, I get to check off all kinds of stuff and the app celebrates me with a happy bird and confetti. On low energy days, Finch serves as a checklist of must-do’s. I must take my meds. I must brush my teeth. I must get some movement in, even if it’s only 10 minutes. I keep nice-to-have’s which I don’t need to feel bad about skipping. I complete goals throughout the day and that feels nice because my birb is cheering me along the way.
Especially on low energy days, it doesn’t matter if we finish everything that day, but if we do that’s exciting!
This is not the only way I have used this app, and it’s certainly not limited to this context. You can use it to measure anxiety levels over time, track mood averages, document patterns, help regulate your nervous system via breathing and stretching exercises, improve focus, and a lot more. It entirely depends on what you need from what it offers.
TL;DR
The flexibility in how you can use the app and what you get out of it is what makes Finch worth trying out. It might not work for everyone, especially as evidenced in the app reviews(!), but the Finch team has developed a robust and thoughtful self-care product that can serve multiple needs.
Recent updates hint at internal vision changes, which perhaps I’d be more privy to if I was in the Discord community. The Finch team is open about their philosophy and the strategies used in the app’s functionality and offerings but I haven’t read much about it since I left. (Release notes history isn’t easy to navigate publicly unless you follow along on your choice of social media, which I don’t do.) I’m the target audience for this app so the changes only improved my experience. However, I can see where there might be concern since new features were added without the on/off flexibility you saw in earlier versions of the app.
I mentioned earlier in the post the responsibility of maintaining a self-care app focused on helping people with their mental health management, even if in a non-professional capacity (and all kinds of disclaimers, of course). Even with casual use it can be severely impactful to lose something you relied on for maintaining stability. From one day to the next, the design team can decide to go in a different direction! I don’t know the best way to handle those kinds of changes, but I do love that Finch offers so much flexibility in how you can make the app work for you, so I hope they’ll continue that in future developments.
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