Stop smoking with the ‘Quit Now: My QuitBuddy’ Android app

Well, ’tis the season and all that but seriously a large portion of people in Australia make the very hard and excellent decision to stop smoking as a New Years resolution and as an ex-smoker myself I am well aware of just how difficult this decision can be. The Australian government wants to help you out with your decision and has provided a number of excellent resources to do just that, starting with the Quitnow website, they also provide the Quitline(13 78 48) which provides support and also a QuitPack and now they also supply the Quit Now: My QuitBuddy Android App.

The app has 3 settings presented to you on startup : ‘Quit Now’, prepare to ‘Quit Later’ or ‘Continue quitting’. Once you select where you’re at in the quitting process you’ll be presented with a profile to fill in which lists your smoking history, including how much you smoke, how long you’ve smoked for, your age and date you actually quit. You are also able to identify ‘danger times’ when you are most vulnerable to feeling like a cigarette. You’re encouraged to add a photo of your family and add goals. All of this info can be changed and added to at any time from the app.

Once you’ve run entered in all your information to the profile screen you come to your home page, which is filled out from the data you just entered. You have a counter which tells you how many days, hours and minutes you’ve been smoke free for and this is very handy some times during this process. The app also gives you an estimate of just how much money you’ve saved by quitting smoking so far. The home screen also contains a graphic of the human body and will update with information on how your body is benefitting from quitting smoking.

One of the biggest things that people trying to quit find is the need for distraction and the app three different ways to do this :

• Distract me – which includes various ways to distract you from the cigarette craving including suggestions for visualisatons, activities such as brushing your teeth or listening to the radio or actual activities starting with a scratch panel, which you wipe away the top layer to reveal a message or all the way to the Fruit Sorter Game where you have to sort fruit from a conveyor belt into the various different repositories and to tell you the truth that was actually fairly entertaining.

<liBuddy Up – this presents you with three options, you can call the Quitline directly from the app, you can call a designated 'Quit Buddy' which you can assign from your phones contacts or you can read various messages from the community at large who are also going through the same process as you to remind you that you're not alone in this process.

<liLastly is the Remind Me – which comes up with facts about why smoking is bad for you but presents them in a way that reminds you of the new Quit smoking message of 'Every Cigarette you Don’t Smoke is doing you good’.

The app will come up with tips for the first 30 days when you load it up such as ‘Be Aware of cravings. Use My QuitBuddy to distract you if it gets bad’. There is also a Widget which provides you with a count of the days, hours and minutes you’ve quit for available at a handy glance as well as a tip from the My Quit Buddy app, the widget will also send you encouragement at various stages such as ‘Congratulations, it’s been two weeks’.

There’s no escaping the fact that this appears to be a direct iOS port, there’s no action bar or Holo Guidelines in effect here but the overall achievement is that there is an app to help you out, at version 1.1 this is their first attempt at an app although there has been no moves to update it since its release back in October last year(2012). It’s available for devices running Android 2.2 and upwards, it’s free with no ads in there that I can see and it’s a fairly small 7MB download.

All we can say is try it out and good luck quitting, we wish you the best.