I went looking for a habit tracker with rewards because the phrase itself kept surfacing from unrelated searches. On October 18, 2026 I ran it through Google’s autocomplete (the firefox client, English, US) from five different seed phrases, and “habit tracker with rewards” came back as an exact suggestion twice, with a related cluster (“to do list with rewards,” “gamified to do list,” “to do list app that rewards you”) showing up from three more seeds. That is not one lucky guess. People are typing a specific request: track habits, get rewarded.
So I opened the apps that answer that request directly. Five pages, read in full: Habit Tracker: Goals & Rewards, Habit Tracker: Rewardly, Habit Rewards, StickK, and Beeminder. I also read secondhand coverage of Habitica, the best-known gamified tracker, though I could not load its own page directly.
What every habit tracker with rewards does the same way
Read under the first heading above, “habit tracker with rewards” is really describing one mechanic repeated five times with different skins. Habit Tracker: Goals & Rewards has you build a personal reward catalog with point thresholds you set yourself, then earn points by finishing habits, to-dos, or Pomodoro sessions. Habit Tracker: Rewardly drops a random number of points when you complete a habit (occasionally a bigger drop), and you spend those points on rewards you define, like coffee or a movie. Habit Rewards pays 1, 4, 8, or 16 coins depending on a difficulty tier you assign, and again, you build your own reward list and price it in coins.
Three different apps, one shape: completion earns an abstract currency, and then you have to do a second, separate thing, open a catalog you built, decide what you have earned, and spend the balance. The reward does not exist until you shop for it. Habitica, from the reviews I read, layers on experience points and gold spent on gear and quests, which is the same shape with a fantasy skin, and it adds something the “rewards” framing hides: missed dailies cost HP. That is a penalty sitting underneath a system marketed as a reward.
StickK and Beeminder go the opposite direction entirely. StickK has you sign a commitment contract and lose real money to a person, a charity, or an anti-charity if you miss your goal. Beeminder calls it a bright red line and charges your card the moment you cross it. Neither is a reward system in any sense; both are built on the threat of losing something, which is a different lever than the one someone searching “habit tracker with rewards” is asking for.
None of the five attach the reward to what you actually did
I specifically checked each page for photo or video logging, because that is the detail I most wanted to compare against. Habit Tracker: Goals & Rewards mentions none. Habit Rewards mentions none; its logging surfaces are a tile grid, a calendar, and stats. Rewardly is the closest: as of its version 3.3.0, a check-in can include a photo, and the listing says plainly that photos stay on your device. That is real, and it is more than the other two offer. But the photo is attached to a check-in, not to one specific completed task, there is no video option, and nothing about it feeds back into the reward itself. The point balance and the photo are two separate records that happen to live in the same app.
So the reward, across every app I opened, is a number. You see a balance go up, and separately, you decide what that number is worth and cash it in. There is no single object that reflects everything you have done, and nothing links the reward directly to the specific thing you finished.
What I built instead, and where it falls short
This is the part where I say plainly that I built the app I am about to describe, so judge the comparison accordingly. DreamStore keeps the reward and the record as the same thing, and removes the shopping step entirely.
Finish a todo or a routine step, and a small planet in the center of the screen reacts and grows right there. Nothing is earned and set aside for later. There is no catalog to build, no price to assign, no currency to spend, because the growth itself is the payout. Trees, flowers, a pond, and a house appear as you go, and growth stages never move backwards, so there is nothing to lose on a bad week, which is also why DreamStore has no streaks: a missed day is not counted against you, and whatever you did yesterday stays exactly where it was.
The photo and video piece works the way Rewardly’s check-in photo almost works, but attached one level deeper. You attach what you made, where you went, or how you trained directly to the todo you just finished, not to a generic daily check-in. Open the diary later and you see that day, a specific photo next to a specific completed task, rather than a point total or a line of text. I wrote more about why the no-streak mechanic works this way in a separate post about removing streaks entirely, and more about attaching photos to finished tasks specifically in a post about to-do apps with photo diaries.
Where this does not fit: if what you want is an actual shop, a point balance you can spend on a real coffee or a movie ticket you pick yourself, DreamStore does not do that, and Rewardly or Habit Rewards will serve that specific want better. There is no financial stake either, so if the StickK or Beeminder model (real money on the line) is what keeps you honest, this is the wrong tool. DreamStore runs on Android and iPhone, and the free tier runs ads; on Android a Pro subscription removes them and adds more planet decoration slots, a full year of stats, extra widget colors, and higher video and AI limits.
What I checked, and what I did not
As of October 2026, I read the App Store listings for Habit Tracker: Goals & Rewards and Habit Tracker: Rewardly directly, the official site for Habit Rewards, the Wikipedia entry for StickK (the vendor’s own site returned a 403 to my fetch), and the official Beeminder site. I did not load Habitica’s own site or app listing directly; what I report about it (XP, gold, HP loss on missed dailies) comes from independent reviews surfaced in search results, which is a weaker source than the four pages I opened myself, so I am flagging it as such rather than stating it with the same confidence.
I did not test any of these apps by installing them, so I cannot speak to bugs, onboarding friction, or whether the reward catalogs feel satisfying in practice, only to what each listing claims about its own mechanic. I also have no measurement of whether a reward that is automatic (DreamStore’s planet) retains users better than a reward you shop for (the three points-based apps); that would need actual retention data from both sides, and I do not have it.
DreamStore’s own facts above (the planet, the no-streak design, the photo and video diary, pricing) are current as of the Google Play listing on October 18, 2026, last updated by the developer on October 14, 2026.