MotyMate: Self Care Pets

What is MotyMate: Habit Tracker app?

MotyMate joins together a few app styles to produce a cohesive family tool.

Virtual pets, allowances, wellness and chores might not sound like a natural fit for each other, but MotyMate's innovative app shows they can. The result is an app to help kids contribute to family life, develop their sense of responsibility, get active, develop strategies to promote mental health and well-being and have fun with a virtual pet.

The virtual pet provides motivation, rewards and guidance to anyone who uses the app. We say anyone because the app has recently made slight adjustments to let its tools work just as well for adults. Swap out a child-appropriate chore for an adult-based task, and it does the same job of reminding and motivating grown-ups too.

In this review of MotyMate, we'll focus on its use with kids but keep in mind that adults also enjoy its take on organisation and wellness.

For kids, the app's original audience, it helps them to keep track of what they need to do. If their parents choose, they can link this to pocket money, where kids work up to the full allowance as they complete their chores and tasks on time.

Sections in the app encourage kids to get active through dance and exercise. Third-party videos show many different dances and activities for kids to follow. The journaling tasks are guided by prompts from the MotyMate personal pet whose sadness, if you quit early, motivates you to stay engaged.

What we love about MotyMate app.

The different aspects of this app come together perfectly to create a tool that can positively impact family life and children's social and emotional growth.

The app, especially on a phone, looks great and is an attractive and fun place for kids to visit. While there, they can find many things to do, which is not the case in most chores and organisation apps.

They can find things to amuse them that have positive benefits, such as dancing. They can reflect on the positives in their life and process the problems in journals and reflective tools. And, of course, they can track the growth of their rewards from completing their chores and tasks.

Ever present is their MotyMate giving the app a personalised and gamelike feel.

What skills does it teach?

MotyMate supports kids as they develop many life skills, such as organisation and responsibility.

Additionally, it has features which can help them reflect and deal with issues in their lives, such as happiness, exercise and journaling. Writing in the journal will allow kids to practice their literacy skills.

Some of the happiness exercises encourage kids to exercise by stretching, dancing or doing other activities.

Younger kids, as long as they can read, can also use the app to help establish personal care routines such as washing and cleaning their teeth before bed.

What age is it appropriate for?

MotyMate asks parents to enter their child's date of birth, and the app will adjust its content and tools to match the age. As parents set up the app for their kids, the main indicator of age suitability will be how well kids can use it. It does require some level of literacy ability to read the tasks and use the features like journaling.

MotyMate was originally designed for parents and children, but it seems that grown-ups wanted in on the fun, and the app adapted a little to make it easier for adults to use. This adaptation should not change the experience but make it easier for adults to use without setting up a stand-in parent/child relationship for the app.

If you want to team up with a friend, you can use them as a support network which is a good way of the app reusing the parent/child relationship to serve how adults might use the app.

Is MotyMate app easy to use?

MotyMAte is free to download, making it easy to use if your child has their own device. You can set up the app and keep your MotyMate profile on your phone while your child has their device set to their profile.

The app can still work if there is just one family device. Profile switching is easy within the app.

You can create your parent account using your email address or an Apple or Google sign-in. You use this account to sign into the app on all devices and then switch the app to the appropriate profile.

You can easily create custom events matching your family and household tasks, but the app has some ready-made tasks. Start with these to see how the app works for you and your child.

How will students benefit?

Using MotyMate to add structure to their day takes kids towards greater self-reliance. They'll still get reminders to do what needs to be done, but it doesn't come from you. They can check their phone and finish the task in advance or when the app nudges them.

Nobody likes to be nagged, even when they don't get things done without being prodded, so taking this role away from parents and placing it on the app can help parent/child relationships. The tangible and recorded link between tasks and rewards also provides kids with certainty that their expectations will be met.

The appeal of the virtual pet in the app will help embed using MotyMate in kids' minds. It motivates its encouragement and customisation options. It also gives kids a reason to keep engaged with the app, where they will see their future chores, rewards, and a record of their past diligence.

Kids can become involved in choosing their tasks. The app has a feature to let them suggest something they'd like to take responsibility for, along with a commensurate reward. This is restricted to some extent in the free tier but fully unlimited in the premium app.

How will parents benefit?

When your child has MotyMate, you can remind kids to get things done without nagging. These tasks can be chores but might also be part of kids' daily routines, like getting their school bag ready for the next day or cleaning their teeth.

Parents have the freedom to determine the rewards they want to link with completing chores and tasks. It can be financial by relating to allowances or Amazon wishlist items. If you prefer, you can make them more experience-based, such as screen time or days out.

How will teachers benefit?

With some thought, MotyMate could be used in schools to provide support to some children with special educational needs. The app's features could help them adapt to new routines and remember the order in which their day's tasks need to be completed.

This is not the app's intended purpose so if you do consider using it this way, test the app in use first before subscribing.

How much does MotyMate app cost?

You can download the MotyMate app for free and use its core functionality. A subscription makes the app more flexible to meet your needs and adds useful features, and you can try this for free for seven days.

The app awards stars that kids can spend on items for their MotyMate. They get these for completing tasks in the app, including happiness and journalling exercises. You can also top these up with an additional in-app purchase.

When you subscribe, you gain extra features and controls. In the free app, all tasks are rated as medium difficulty, but when you subscribe, you can adjust this so that more difficult tasks receive a greater reward.

The yearly subscription works out slightly above 10% cheaper over the same time if you subscribe monthly. This difference is not as large as with some apps, so sticking with the monthly option until you are sure the app will be a good fit is a sensible option.

Is MotyMate app safe to use?

MotyMate asks for permission to send notifications. You and your child can still use the app without giving this permission, but you'll lose the app's reminder functionality, which will prompt kids when a task needs doing.

When you set up your child's account, it asks for their email address. This information is not compulsory, but if you enter it, the app will send them emails showing their progress. The developer states it will never be shared with other companies or sold.

MotyMate adapts its content to show age-appropriate content, so it asks for you to enter your kids' date of birth. While the developer also states it will never be sold or shared, we feel the requirement to enter the full date of birth exceeds what is necessary. We'd prefer if the app asked for no more than a month and a year.

Switching from a child's profile to their parent's has no lock. We'd like to see this be PIN or password protected.

What can MotyMate app improve on?

A useful feature would be to add the option to make some tasks provide a greater reward if completed early. For example, kids could receive their allotted allowance for completing a job but some extra -in-app stars for doing it a day well before the deadline.

MotyMate works on both phones and tablets, but it is not made for the iPad. It runs in a compatibility format, filling a phone-sized screen section or stretching to fill more. It is perfectly usable, but it is rare today to see an app that does not reflow its content to use larger screens better.

During the review of MotyMate, we experienced a few frozen screens and unexpected app closures. These happened on the iPad (2021) rather than iPhone (XR). Developers usually catch Such bugs quickly, and we expect them to be corrected.

Overall rating of the app.

MotyMate's features can be found in other apps but not all in the same app, which is surprising because they mesh so well. Whatever your primary reason for wanting MotyMate, supporting happiness or tracking chores, the app's other features are still worth having. They may provide you with benefits you hadn't considered. We highly recommend you try the free download and consider bringing a MotyMate into your family. MotyMate: Habit Tracker is a five-star app.