Aura: everything that changed in the rebrand

AuraTask is now Aura — Smart Tasks and Habits. This is the largest release since launch: a new name, a rebuilt interface, and a genuinely different idea of what progress means. Your account, your history and your data all carry over. Nothing to migrate, nothing to re-subscribe.

Here is everything that changed.

Why the name changed

The old name led with "tasks", but a to-do list was never the interesting part — plenty of apps hold one. What this app is actually about is consistency, and specifically staying consistent when life refuses to cooperate. The new name says both halves out loud: tasks and habits, with something smarter tying them together.

Progress works differently now

This is the change that matters most, so it comes first.

Momentum replaces the XP ladder

Your level used to be lifetime XP divided into thousands. It only ever went up, which meant it measured how long you had been here rather than how you were doing. Someone who did five hundred tasks in one manic week outranked someone with ninety days of quiet consistency.

Momentum is a rolling 28-day consistency score built from three things: how reliably you keep your scheduled habits, how much focused work you log, and how much of what you plan you actually finish. Domains you do not use are simply left out of the calculation, so never touching the timer will not hold you back.

Momentum can go down. That sounds like a punishment and is meant as the opposite: a number that can fall is a number worth trusting. Your level now describes how things are going lately, not how many months you have been logged in.

Breaking a streak no longer erases it

Miss a few days on a habit you had a real run going, and you will now see a comeback counter instead of a zero — something like "5 days away · best 23 🏆 · 112 total". It is deliberately cool and factual: never red, never a lecture.

The point is to change the goal. "Get back to 23" is unreachable and makes people quit. "Stop this number growing today" is achievable in the next five minutes. And the lifetime check-in total is there because it is the one number nobody can take away from you — a broken streak makes months of effort feel erased, and that total is proof it was not.

You can fix a day you missed

Tick a habit on any past day and the streak repairs itself. Forgetting to log something is not the same as not doing it, and the app no longer pretends otherwise.

Rest days are planned, not failed

Days a habit is not scheduled for do not count against you, and you earn rest-day tokens that excuse a day you choose to take off. Nowhere in the app will you see a completion percentage presented as a verdict on you.

Today — the new home screen

The old dashboard has been replaced by Today: one surface with your focus timer, your habits for today, and your agenda side by side. Focus is no longer a page you navigate to — the timer lives in the shell, one tap from whatever is next. An "Up next" strip picks out your next open item so starting requires no decision.

Plan — tasks and calendar, finally together

Tasks and Calendar used to be separate pages that knew nothing about each other. They are now one surface with four views of the same data:

• Weekly — the week as day columns plus a backlog. Drag tasks between days to re-plan.
• Kanban — the same work grouped by state instead of by date. Drag between To do, In progress and Done.
• Month — the zoomed-out view, with priority, times and estimates on each card. Deadlines that fall on a different day than the work is planned for now show up on the deadline too, so nothing is invisible until it is already late.
• Schedule — a time grid for one day. Drag a task onto an hour to schedule it; blocks are sized by your estimate.

Tasks also gained subtasks, repeat schedules, and a separation between the day you plan to do something and the day it is due.

Habits gets its own page

Habits scheduled for today appear on Today, but a habit that is not due today used to be invisible. Habits is now a top-level page showing every habit with its full history as a year grid — the whole run at a glance, with rest days, missed days and bonus days all distinguishable. Click any square to check or uncheck that day.

Streaks are also counted properly now. A Monday and Thursday habit used to be capped at a streak of two because the old code counted consecutive calendar days and ignored your schedule. It now counts scheduled occurrences, so some of your streaks will look considerably longer than you remember. That is the correct number, not a bug.

Familiars, quests and the Collection

Familiars are pixel-art companions that evolve as your streaks grow, across six elemental families tied to habit categories. They appear on your habits, in your focus session, and as your profile avatar.

Quests replace the old challenges. They are personal, never competitive — keep at least one habit on five different days this week, finish three focus sessions, that kind of thing — and pay out coins.

The Collection is where coins finally buy something: familiar avatars, avatar frames, profile titles and app colorways. Coins used to accumulate with nothing to spend them on. That is fixed.

The AI actually does the work now

• Daily briefing — each morning it reads your open tasks, your habits for today and your connected calendar, then drafts a realistic plan with suggested time blocks. Accept it in one tap and the timed blocks land on your schedule.
• Natural-language capture — type "call dentist tomorrow 3pm, 15 min, high priority" and get a properly structured, scheduled task.

Every account gets five AI daily briefings free, so you can judge the feature by using it rather than reading about it.

Google Calendar, rebuilt

• Connect more than one Google account.
• Choose exactly which calendars appear, per account.
• Your events show alongside your plan as read-only blocks.
• Turn any event into a task — title, time and duration carried over, linked back to the original.

To be completely clear about what this does and does not do: Aura uses read-only access. It can display and import your events. It can never create, edit or delete anything in your Google Calendar. There is no two-way sync and no export, and we would rather say so plainly than let the word "sync" imply something untrue.

Plans have been simplified

Three tiers became two:

• Free — unlimited tasks and habits, the focus timer, Momentum, the comeback counter, quests, familiars and the Collection, plus five AI briefings to try. Everything that builds consistency is free, and stays free.
• Aura Plus — unlimited AI briefings, natural-language capture, Google Calendar, Momentum history and advanced analytics.

If you were on Coffee or Boost, you are now on Aura Plus with everything included, at no extra cost and with nothing to re-subscribe. Plan changes only ever move upward — nobody loses access in this migration.

What happened to your data

Everything is intact. In detail:

• All tasks, habits, check-ins, streaks and focus sessions carry over untouched.
• Your lifetime XP is kept. It still powers achievements and coin earnings — it simply is not your headline number anymore. You can still see it under Progress.
• Your coins came with you, and now buy things in the Collection.
• Streaks were recalculated to respect each habit's real schedule, as described above.
• Old power-ups were retired and refunded as coins. They sold XP multipliers and streak freezes, which quietly undermined the thing the app is supposed to measure.
• Long-standing accounts receive a Veteran achievement for the level they reached on the old ladder. That history counts.
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• Your old bookmarks still work and redirect to the right place.

Deleting is no longer permanent

Deleting a task or habit used to destroy it instantly, taking a year of completion history with it. Deleted items now sit recoverable for 30 days before they are removed for good. In an app whose entire value is accumulated history, one misclick should never be final.

What we removed

Honest changelogs include the subtractions:

• Leaderboards and challenges — competitive ranking rewarded grinding, not consistency, and contradicted everything else here. Progress is personal.
• Power-ups — see above.
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Found something broken? Please tell us

This is a large release, and realistically some things will be rough — a layout that looks odd, a number that seems wrong, something that behaves unexpectedly. We would genuinely rather hear about it than have you quietly work around it.

There is a new Help & Feedback page in the app where you can open a ticket: a question, a bug report, or just an idea. It comes straight to us and the reply lands in the same place. Small reports are welcome — if something feels off, that is reason enough to send it.

Thank you

To everyone who has been using this since the early days: thank you. You used it while it was rough, and much of what changed here came from watching how it was really used rather than how we imagined it would be. The decision to stop punishing broken streaks came directly from that — the old model plainly was not working, and it took real usage to make that obvious.

We hope the new version earns the time you have already put in.