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Sparky vs Achieve: Focus Sessions or Whole-Day Habits

August 17, 2026

I build Sparky, so weigh this accordingly. The short version: pick Achieve if the thing you want to earn from is focused work, because its Pomodoro timer and its Apple Health goals are measured by your phone instead of reported by you. Pick Sparky if the habits that matter to you happen away from the screen, where no sensor can follow them.

What do Sparky and Achieve do the same way?

Both put your chosen apps behind Apple’s Screen Time framework and hand the minutes back after you finish something. Both are free to start with a paid tier on top. Neither one gets around iOS: they sit on FamilyControls and ManagedSettings, so pulling the Screen Time permission stops the lock in either app.

The differences that show up before you have used either: Achieve runs on iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro and needs iOS 17.4 or later. Sparky is iPhone only for now. Achieve is a solo-developer app from Jonathan Goldson, sitting at 4.5 stars from 44 ratings when I checked the listing on August 17, 2026. Both of us are small.

Worth saying once, because neither app’s marketing will: Apple’s own Screen Time does the locking half for free. App limits, Downtime, the works. If a plain daily limit holds you, you need neither of us. The reason this category exists at all is that “Ignore Limit” is one tap away and costs nothing.

Can Achieve stop you cheating?

Partly, and the marketing claims more than the app can deliver. Achieve’s App Store description promises that your phone tracks progress “so you don’t need to worry about cheating or manual updates.” That is true for the goals a sensor can actually observe. It cannot be true for the rest, and Achieve’s own documentation shows why.

Their earn screen time guide lists the goal types they recommend. Alongside workouts and walks read from Apple Health, it suggests clearing the sink, taking out the trash, kitchen prep, reading a chapter, and working through flashcards. No iPhone can watch you take out the trash. Those goals are self-reported, which is the same trust model Sparky runs on, described in a way that sounds stricter.

So the accurate version is a split. Focus-timer sessions, Screen Time data and Health workouts are genuinely verified, and that verified subset is real ground Achieve holds over Sparky, which checks nothing at all. Everything on their household and study list runs on your word. If “my phone will keep me honest” is the reason you are choosing this app, know which half of it you are buying.

There is a broader point underneath. Friction is the part of this category with actual evidence behind it: in the PNAS study on app-opening interventions, around 36 percent of app-open attempts were abandoned once a small barrier appeared. What no app here has shown is that its particular earning mechanic produces a lasting outcome. Achieve’s site says users cut screen time by 73 percent on average and publishes no methodology or source for it. Read that as marketing. Read ours the same way: Sparky has no outcome trial either, and we wrote up the state of the evidence before comparing anybody.

Should your earning come from focus sessions or habits?

This is the real fork, and it is a question about your day rather than about the software. Achieve’s center of gravity is the work block: start a timer, finish the session, get your apps back. Sparky’s is the habit list, where drinking water, walking, reading and checking in each carry their own weight.

Gloria Mark’s attention research is the argument for Achieve’s side. Her book Attention Span reports an average of about 47 seconds on a single screen before attention moves, measured across two decades of workplace studies. If your problem is that a work block never survives contact with your phone, an app whose whole shape is the protected work block matches the problem exactly.

The argument for the other side is that plenty of people do not have a Pomodoro-shaped life. If your screen time problem lives in the evening, on the couch, between chores, then a focus timer is the wrong instrument and you will end up starting sessions you do not need to manufacture credit. Sparky’s model assumes the earning happens across a whole day rather than inside a work sprint.

One mechanical difference follows from that. Achieve’s guide treats earned access as immediate: finish the goal, the apps come back, and nothing in their documentation describes accumulating or carrying unused time. Sparky banks what you do not spend, so minutes you earned on Tuesday are still there on Wednesday. We think time bought with real habits should not evaporate overnight. The cost of that choice is that our code has to handle the midnight boundary carefully, which is a genuinely awkward corner of Apple’s API.

What does Achieve cost?

Neither of us can give you a clean number, and Achieve’s is unusually hard to pin down. When I read its App Store listing on August 17, 2026, it showed seven separate in-app purchases at once: Achieve Premium Monthly at $9.99, Pro Monthly at $12.99, Monthly at $14.99, Premium Yearly at $24.99, Achieve Premium Yearly at $29.99, Yearly at $39.99, and a $44.99 Lifetime Membership.

Three different monthly prices and three different yearly prices, live simultaneously. That is a price test, which is a normal thing for a small app to run. The consequence for you is that the monthly price you get offered could be $9.99 or it could be $14.99, and nothing published anywhere tells you which. The set moves, too: our category audit on August 2 counted eight tiers on the same listing, reaching higher than $44.99.

Sparky is free to start with an optional Pro tier, and our pricing page lists what Pro costs. I would rather show you one number than seven.

Which one should you pick?

Choose by where your bad hours actually happen. Achieve suits a workday that falls apart into your phone, and it checks the fitness and focus goals a sensor can see. Sparky suits an evening that disappears, and it rewards habits no sensor could ever watch. Apple’s free Screen Time is the honest first try for both cases.

Pick Achieve if your screen time bleeds out of work hours and a protected focus block is the fix. It is the only app in this category built around the work session rather than around fitness, it covers iPad and Vision Pro, and its Health-backed goals are checked in a way ours are not. Go in expecting to find out your price at the paywall.

Pick Sparky if the habits worth rewarding are spread across your day and most of them are invisible to a sensor anyway. You will be trusted, which is either the feature or the flaw depending on who you are.

Still deciding between the whole field rather than these two? The earned screen time category guide covers every app in it, including the ones neither of us would mention.

Sparky turns small habits into screen time you earn. Download it free on the App Store.