Why this app has no push notifications, no streaks, no badges
July 18, 2026 · 5 min read
This is a decision, not an omission
Push notifications, day streaks, achievement badges. These three appear in almost every app that touches habits, for an obvious reason: they raise the number of times the app gets opened.
Table for None has none of them. Here is the reasoning for each.
No push notifications
A push notification is a cue that we manufacture.
This entire product rests on the idea that cravings are started by cues, and one of the strongest cues available is a phone speaking up on its own. If we sent a notification at 11pm, even with the most considerate wording imaginable, we would be generating the exact thing this app exists to stand in for.
Worse than that: we would be teaching your phone that 11pm is when you think about food. After three weeks that cue belongs to us rather than to you.
The rule is that this app gets opened by you, at a moment when the craving is already there. It does not come looking for you.
No streaks
A streak works by creating something that can be lost. After twenty days, the thing you are protecting is no longer a habit. It is the number twenty.
The problem shows up on the day you miss. The streak resets, and the feeling is wildly out of proportion to what actually happened. You skipped one day; you did not break anything. The interface disagrees, and it disagrees loudly.
For this product a streak is wrong in a second way as well. The goal is not to open the app every day. If a week goes by where you never felt the need to open it, that is a good outcome and not a broken chain.
An app counting streaks would score that week as a failure. We did not want to build something that misreads its own users that badly.
No badges
Badges move motivation from the inside to the outside. You start for a reason of your own, and a few weeks later you are continuing because of the badge that is nearly unlocked.
This works in the short term and has a long-term cost: when the badges run out, the original reason has been pushed into the background and does not always come back.
Badges also create a side game. People place simulated orders to earn the badge rather than because there is a craving that needs somewhere to go. At that point the app has become a way to spend time, which is not the thing we set out to build.
What is left
After removing those three, what remains is fairly small.
- A catalogue to browse
- A tray for picking dishes and adding toppings
- An order button, and a wait with a defined end
- A number recording the money you did not spend
- One if-then sentence that you wrote yourself
Nothing pushes you back. Nothing penalises you for not coming back.
What this costs us
To be fair about it: this decision makes the product harder to grow. Retention metrics will be lower than an app with push notifications and streaks. We knew that when we decided, and decided that way regardless.
The reason is that the alternative contains a contradiction with no way out. An app built so that your phone pulls you around less, which then pulls you around with notifications, cancels itself. There is no clever notification copy that resolves that.
The only approach that made sense to us was to build something you remember when you need it and forget when you do not.
The measure we care about is not how often you open the app. It is whether it was there on the night you needed it.