History

The original inspiration for Tickbuddy and Tickdroid was the “one-bit journal” Android app Tickmate. I started using Tickmate around 2016 for my personal habit tracking, way before habit tracking was big and cool. At the time, Tickmate was just about the only app with this concept.

After I migrated my personal productivity management to Nextcloud, I started looking around for an app like Tickmate but with Nextcloud sync. There wasn’t one. Although I started thinking about building one myself, I felt intimidated by the size of the challenge. So the idea was on ice for a couple of years.

This changed with the advent of AI coding tools. Tickbuddy and all of the companion apps are developed with the help of Claude Code.

So, Tickbuddy was born as a “habit tracker for Nextcloud” and was first released on the Nextcloud app store in May 2026. Tickdroid, the Android companion app, was developed alongside Tickbuddy, but it took until August 2026 for it to appear on F-Droid. Both are under active development with multiple releases. Features such as Android home screen widgets and an alternative screen layout option were added based on user requests.

Today, habit tracking is still the main use case. But Tickbuddy has started to evolve towards a more flexible “daily everything-tracker” concept that goes beyond its original scope, in particular via integration with automations and AI agents. Tickcli and TickLLMe are the building blocks, whilst a lot of backend work has been going into making it work.

Check out the Roadmap for more features that are planned.