Turn Your iPhone Wallpaper Into a Habit Tracker

To turn your iPhone wallpaper into a habit tracker, use Daily — Life Calendar to render your habits and streaks into a wallpaper image, then set it as your lock screen. Days you complete fill in green, and an iOS Shortcut refreshes the wallpaper each day so your progress is always current.

Why does a wallpaper habit tracker help?

The hardest part of any habit is remembering to do it, and then keeping the streak alive. A tracker hidden inside an app can’t help with either, because you have to remember to open it first. A wallpaper solves that. You look at your phone dozens of times a day, so a habit tracker on your lock screen is in front of you constantly. It quietly reminds you what you meant to do and shows you how you’re doing.

There’s a second effect: streaks. When completed days fill in and a chain builds up, you don’t want to break it. Seeing that chain every time you unlock your phone turns a vague intention into a visible record you’re motivated to protect.

How do I set it up?

Five steps:

1. Add your habits. Open Daily and add each habit. You can give it a custom emoji, a reminder, a note, and a time estimate.
2. Pick a habit view. Choose a habit layout, such as the streaks view or the GitHub-style contribution graph.
3. Generate and set the wallpaper. Daily renders your habits into a wallpaper image and saves it to Photos. Set it as your lock screen from Photos, or long-press the lock screen and tap Customize.
4. Complete habits with a swipe. Each day, swipe to complete a habit. The day fills in green and your streak grows.
5. Turn on daily auto-refresh. Add Daily’s built-in iOS Shortcut once. After that, iOS updates the wallpaper for you every day.

The whole thing takes a few minutes, and only step five is one-time setup.

What does Daily show on the wallpaper?

Daily gives you a few ways to see your habits:

• Green-fill days. Complete a habit and the day fills in green, so recent progress is obvious at a glance.
• Streaks. A running count of consecutive days keeps momentum visible and gives you something to protect.
• Contribution graph. A GitHub-style grid shows consistency across weeks and months, getting darker the more you keep up.

You mark habits done with a swipe, which is fast enough to do the moment you finish something. Each habit can carry its own emoji, reminder, note, and time estimate, so the tracker reflects your real routine rather than a generic checklist.

Widgets, if you prefer the home screen

Not everyone wants their habits on the lock screen. Daily also includes home-screen widgets, including a Habits widget and a Contribution Chart widget, plus Year Progress and Memento Mori. You can run a wallpaper and a widget together: the wallpaper for the daily nudge, the widget for a quick check.

Keeping it honest and low-effort

A habit tracker only works if it’s current, which is why the daily refresh matters. Once the iOS Shortcut is set up, you never have to regenerate the image by hand; it updates itself so your streaks and green-fill stay accurate. If you miss a day, the gap simply shows, which is useful feedback rather than a punishment.

Daily requires no account. Your data stays on your device and syncs through your own iCloud across iPhone and iPad. If you’d like to see your habits as a full year at once, pair this with the year in pixels view.

You can get Daily on the App Store and turn your wallpaper into a habit tracker today.