spf.today review: a minimalist sunscreen tracker that earned a spot on my Lock Screen

I have tried every kind of SPF reminder. Calendar pings at 9 a.m. Reapplication alarms at noon. Sticker notes on my mirror that I started ignoring within a week. None of them stuck. The reason was always the same: the friction between the reminder and the actual moment of putting cream on my face was just enough that I would dismiss the notification, mean to do it in five minutes, and forget by lunchtime.

spf.today, built by indie shop Destro Labs, does something subtle that the older trackers missed. It puts a one-tap Live Activity on the Lock Screen and on the Apple Watch face, so logging is the same gesture as the application. No app to open. No screen to navigate. You apply the cream, you tap the bubble, the streak ticks up.

What it is and what it isn’t

This is a habit tracker, not a sunscreen recommender. It does not tell you which SPF to buy, does not have an AI scan of your skin, and does not connect to dermatology APIs. It also does not have a community feed or any social layer at all. What it does is log every time you apply sunscreen, keep a streak the way a meditation app might, and give you a simple history graph you can scroll through.

The PRO tier adds two things: a customizable timer for reapplication, and a live UV index pulled from your location. I will get to whether that is worth it.

Who it’s for

If your relationship with sunscreen is already easy, you do not need this app. If you live in a sunny climate and reapply on autopilot, skip it. The audience here is people like me: it is in our routine in theory, we believe in it, and we still skip mornings.

It is also good for parents tracking SPF on kids, which I did not test but a friend who is a pediatrician runs it on her seven-year-old’s iPad. The streak gamifies it just enough that the kid asks her about it.

The features that matter

The Lock Screen Live Activity is the headline. You add the widget once, and a small sun icon sits there until you tap it. Tapping logs the application and shows your current streak. It also gives you a nudge to reapply after the interval you set (default two hours).

The Apple Watch complication is good enough that I started leaving my phone behind on summer walks. Tap the wrist, log it.

The history view is plainer than I expected, which I now think is correct. A calendar grid, days you applied filled in. No graphs of cumulative UV exposure, no charts I would not look at twice. Just whether you did or did not.

The PRO UV index sync is the one feature that genuinely changed my behavior. When the morning UV index hits 7 or higher in my city, the widget changes color. That is the visual cue that gets me to reapply before going on a 90-minute walk to the farmer’s market instead of after I get back red.

The contrarian take

Habit-tracking apps usually get reviewed on their notification cleverness. spf.today’s actual win is that it almost never notifies you. The Live Activity sits there quietly. The reminder is ambient. The thing that finally moved my reapplication behavior was not a louder ping, it was a quieter ping that lived in the place I look at every twenty minutes anyway.

The skincare industry sells SPF as a moral issue. Apply or you are failing at self-care. That framing has done nothing for adherence, in my experience or in any of the behavior-change literature I have read. A streak counter that you tap when you put the cream on is not moralizing. It is just a record. Mine sat at 17 days before I broke it on a foggy Sunday I genuinely did not need sunscreen, and the lack of guilt around resetting was, I think, why I kept using the app.

Real-world test

I ran spf.today for 23 days starting in early April. I logged 19 days. The four misses were rainy mornings when I did not leave the house. Before the app, my best estimate of my SPF adherence in spring was 11 out of 14 days. So a roughly 8-point improvement in adherence, with effectively zero conscious effort once the widget was on the Lock Screen.

Reapplication, which the app also tracks if you log a second tap, went from a number I will admit was close to zero on weekdays to four days in the 23 where I logged a real midday reapply. Not transformative. But better than I was doing alone, and the four days I did it were the four days the UV index was over 8.

How it stacks against Sunshine Tracker (iOS)

Sunshine Tracker is the older and better-known of the SPF habit apps. It is more feature-loaded, with UV history, vitamin D estimates, and a sunburn-risk score. If you want a tracking app that doubles as a dosimeter, Sunshine is the more complete tool.

spf.today is the opposite. Less data, fewer screens, less to learn. The Live Activity is the killer feature; Sunshine has lock-screen widgets but they are not the same one-tap log. For habit formation, friction is the enemy, and spf.today has less of it. For data nerds, Sunshine is the pick. For people who want a streak and quiet, this one.

FAQ

Is the free tier usable on its own? Yes. Free covers the Lock Screen Live Activity, streaks, history, and the Apple Watch logging. You only need PRO if you want the customizable reapplication timer and the live UV index.

Does it work on Android? No. iOS only. The whole product is built around the Live Activity API, which is an Apple-specific feature.

Will it remind me to reapply at the beach? If you have PRO and have your timer set, yes. The default is every two hours. I would set it to 90 minutes for swimming or sweating.

Does it share data anywhere? No social features, no shared logs, no leaderboards. Your history stays on your device. There is an iCloud sync between your phone and watch.

Is the streak going to stress me out? This was my worry going in. In practice, the design is gentle. Breaking a streak just resets the counter. There is no shaming animation, no notification telling you that you failed.

Bottom line

If you already use sunscreen every morning without thinking about it, you do not need spf.today. If you are the rest of us, it might be the smallest behavior-change tool that has ever actually worked on me. For the broader case for daily SPF, read our piece on whether you really need sunscreen indoors and the application-quantity essay on how to apply sunscreen properly. We pair this with our editorial favorite, the Microbiome Glow Serum, in the morning routine. For more posts in this category, see the SPF tag.

Sources

AAD.org/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>American Academy of Dermatology. Sunscreen FAQs. AAD, 2024. Wang SQ, Lim HW. Principles and Practice of Photoprotection. Springer, 2016. Schalka S, et al. The influence of the amount of sunscreen applied and its sun protection factor. Photodermatology, Photoimmunology and Photomedicine, 2019.