- Weekly Meetings
- An app at 3am helps. A phone number of someone who answers at 3am helps more.
- find a meeting
Let’s set expectations before the list. No app keeps anyone clean. What a good app does is smaller and still worth having: it remembers your day count when you are too tired to care, it puts a meeting in front of you when you finally want one, and at 3am it is the thing in your hand that is not a dealer’s number. We have watched people in the rooms use all of these. Here is what holds up.
The day counter most people end up with, and for good reason. You get a clock for each substance, milestone celebrations, a daily pledge in the morning and a review at night, and a feed of people with your exact sobriety date. That last feature sounds like a gimmick until you have a bad day 47 and watch a stranger with the same day count talk themselves through it. Free for the core features; the paid tier adds extras most people can skip at first.
Different animal: a paid subscription course aimed at drinking, built around daily neuroscience lessons and exercises rather than a simple counter. It is the most polished of the bunch and the most expensive, and it works best for the “gray area drinker” who is cutting back or quitting alcohol specifically. For someone whose problem is heroin or meth, it is the wrong tool; that person needs the pages on this site more than an app store.
Free, a little homely looking, and quietly beloved. Multiple clocks, small distraction exercises for cravings, and accountability partners who can see your clocks. Built by one guy in recovery rather than a startup, and it shows in both directions: no polish, no upsell.
A social network of sober people with a “burning desire” button that alerts people nearby when you are struggling. The quality of the experience depends on who is active in your area, which is the honest limitation of every social recovery app. Worth installing alongside a counter rather than instead of one.
The official NA Meeting Search app pulls from the same database as na.org and will find you a meeting in most towns in America, including while traveling, which is when people quietly skip. Our own area meeting list stays current for Northeastern Pennsylvania. If your program is AA, Meeting Guide does the same job. These are free and belong on the first home screen.
Start with one counter (I Am Sober or Nomo) plus one meeting finder. Add Reframe if alcohol is the specific fight and the subscription will not stress your budget. Then notice, honestly, whether you open any of it. An app you check daily beats a better app you deleted, and the row of chairs on Tuesday night beats them both. The people in that row are also the ones who will notice when you stop showing up, which is a feature no developer has shipped yet.