How stosmok works
A plain-English walkthrough of the app, written for someone who hasn't opened it yet.
First run
Getting started
The first time you open stosmok, onboarding walks you through six short animated steps rather than a form: a welcome, your smoking profile (cigarettes per day, pack size and price, used to calculate money saved), your quit moment (right now, or a past date and time if you've already stopped), your reasons for quitting written as motivation cards, your notification preferences, and a plain-language screen about privacy and optional crash reporting.
At the end, your dragon hatches. It starts small, grey and wheezing, exactly as sick as your smoking history says it should be. Everything after that, the streak ring, the stat chips, the health timeline, is built from the profile you just gave it.
The companion
Your dragon's stages
Evolution is tied to your current streak, not to anything you buy. Skins change how a stage looks, never when it unlocks.
Ashling
Small, grey and grounded. Coughs sooty puffs. Eyes dull.
Ember
Faint warm colour returning in the belly. The cough is gone.
Cinder
Colour spreading. Taller, with half-grown wings. Curious, reacts to taps.
Blaze
Full wings and a living flame on the tail. Breathes clean light instead of smoke.
Skyborn
Full colour, confident flight. Breathes light.
Astral
Legendary form. A particle aura, constellation motifs, breathes starlight.
A logged slip dents your dragon's health score briefly, and it recovers over the next couple of days. Not opening the app never costs it health. At worst, it just looks a little lonely until you check in again.
The panic button
What to do during a craving
SOS is reachable from every screen. Pick whichever of the four paths fits the moment, there's no wrong answer.
On the way out, you log the craving's intensity, what triggered it, and whether you beat it, in two taps. Beating a craving gets a proper celebration. If you didn't beat it, see the next section, because that isn't a failure the app holds against you.
A slip is not a relapse
This is the part of the app we care most about getting right, so it's worth spelling out plainly.
A slip is logging one or two cigarettes but continuing your quit. It does not end your current attempt, and it does not reset your streak. Your dragon's health score dips briefly and recovers over the next couple of days. That's the entire consequence.
A relapse is a deliberate choice you make in the app, never something the app decides for you. Declaring a relapse ends your current attempt and starts a new one, so your visible streak does reset. But the time you were smoke free before that point isn't erased: your lifetime smoke-free time is the sum of every attempt you've ever had, and it never goes down. If you've stayed smoke free for 400 days across three attempts, that 400 days stays true forever, even on day one of attempt four.
The relapse flow itself is deliberately warm. There's no guilt screen, no broken-streak animation designed to sting. The app's job is to still be useful to you on the day after a relapse, not to make that day worse.
How the health timeline works
The Progress tab shows a vertical timeline of fifteen health milestones, from your heart rate settling after 20 minutes to your overall risk approaching a never-smoker's after 20 years. Each one unlocks automatically the moment your current streak reaches its threshold, with a full-screen celebration the first time.
A body-map view groups milestones by the system they affect, heart and circulation, blood and oxygen, lungs and airways, taste and smell, immune system, and long-term risk, so you can see at a glance what's already recovered.
Every milestone is sourced from CDC and NHS smoking cessation guidance, and every source is reachable from the screen itself. The app also estimates cigarettes avoided, money saved and life regained, using 11 minutes of life expectancy per cigarette not smoked, a figure from Shaw, Mitchell and Dorling's 2000 study in the BMJ. All of it is labelled as an estimate, because that's what it is.
stosmok is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice. Health timings are drawn from CDC and NHS smoking cessation guidance and are shown as estimates. The life-expectancy figure used in the app (11 minutes regained per cigarette not smoked) comes from Shaw, Mitchell and Dorling, BMJ 2000. If you want medical support to quit, speak to a doctor or a smoking cessation service.
Your data, kept safe
How backup and restore works
Three layers, so losing a phone doesn't mean losing a streak.
Layer 1. The local database
Every read and every write happens on your device, in a local SQLite database. This is the single source of truth, and it works with no network at all.
Layer 2. Automatic device backup
On iOS, the app's data is included in your normal iCloud device backup, plus a small daily snapshot the app writes to its own private iCloud container. On Android, Auto Backup saves your data to your Google Drive automatically. Neither requires you to sign in to anything inside the app, and both restore themselves when you set up a new phone with the same Apple ID or Google account.
Layer 3. Manual export
A single .stosmok file you create from Settings, and the only way to move your data between iOS and Android, since the two platforms' automatic backups don't talk to each other. Sharing it uses the normal share sheet, so AirDrop, email, Drive and messaging all work. Encryption is optional, off by default, and password protected if you turn it on. Importing shows a preview first and asks you to confirm, because import replaces what's on the device.
Moving from an iPhone to an Android phone, or back, has to go through the manual .stosmok export. iCloud backup and Android Auto Backup are both platform features that only restore within the same platform.
Badges, levels and challenges
The Rewards tab holds three things: an animated badge wall with locked silhouettes for what you haven't earned yet, active weekly challenges, and a cosmetic shop.
Almost everything you do earns XP: a daily check-in, beating a craving, writing a journal entry, completing a challenge, unlocking a health milestone, unlocking a badge. XP adds up to levels, and levels unlock free cosmetic accessories and badge frames, never core functionality. Purchasable cosmetics and earned cosmetics are visually distinct sets on purpose, so buying something never makes playing feel pointless, and playing something never feels like it's being held back until you pay.
Still have questions?
The support page covers pricing, refunds, and what happens to your data if you switch phones.