Smoless vs Kwit

What each app is built for

Kwit is a quit-day app, and a polished one. Its App Store listing describes “evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy techniques”, an app that “combines proven science with gamification”, “science-backed craving management” and “progress rewards, achievements, and milestone celebrations”. The Google Play version adds a dashboard that shows “how many days you’ve gone without cigarettes, how much money you’ve saved”, a diary to “identify your cravings, record cigarettes smoked, and cope with relapses”, and motivational cards. Kwit’s own site says the app “is presented as a game with levels to unlock” and mentions breathing exercises. Everything on that list counts from the moment you stop.

What Kwit does not do, as far as its listings describe, is help you taper cigarettes. It does have a gradual-reduction mode, but for nicotine replacement: the Play listing offers to “control your use of nicotine substitutes” and “reduce your consumption gradually with personalized advice”, and lists “reducing nicotine replacement therapy consumption” and “monitoring gum and patch consumption” among its uses. Cigarettes recorded in the diary are slips against a quit date, not entries toward a falling daily goal. If you still smoke twenty a day and cannot picture zero, Kwit begins after the difficult bit.

Smoless is built for exactly that difficult bit. You log each cigarette with one tap and for about a week nothing else happens, while the app learns what you really smoke rather than what you said you smoke. Your first goal sits a cigarette or two under that baseline. It steps down by one or two only when your recent average is already below it, and it never moves back up. There is no quit date to choose before you start; My Plan projects one from the pace you are actually managing. The method is laid out in how to quit smoking gradually.

Side by side

Levels and rewards versus nothing to unlock

Kwit’s bet is that quitting is more bearable as a game. Levels, achievements and milestone celebrations give you a reason to open the app on a day when nothing else about not smoking feels rewarding, and the diary and craving tools are there when you do. There is a small study behind this: 44 Kwit users followed for four weeks, in which each extra level unlocked was associated with about 22 percent higher odds of self-reported seven-day abstinence. That is a correlation in a sample of 44, with a co-author employed by Kwit, and people who were quitting anyway will naturally unlock more levels. It is still more than most apps can show, and it matches common sense: a game you keep returning to beats a counter you stop opening.

Smoless has no game. No levels, no badges, no celebrations. The reward is the number on the screen being lower than it was last month, which is the only reward that will still be there once the novelty of any app has gone. The honest cost is that there is less to come back for. If you need the app to be a place you want to go, Kwit gives you more to go to.

Pressure: notifications, streaks and resets

Kwit is organised around a day counter and the milestones along it, with “tips and messages of encouragement” sent to keep you moving. To its credit, the diary is explicitly designed to “cope with relapses” rather than pretend they do not happen; the listings do not say what a slip does to the counter, so we will not guess. The general shape is the familiar one: a streak that grows, and an app that reaches out to you.

Smoless sends no push notifications and keeps no streak to protect. If you have a bad day the goal stays where it is and the plan absorbs it; nothing resets and nothing buzzes to tell you about it. A bad day is just a higher number in the log, and the next step down waits until your average has recovered. If being nudged is what kept your last attempt alive, that silence is a weakness. If a broken streak is what ended it, it is the point. Either way, the cravings themselves are the same in both apps, and how to deal with cigarette cravings covers what actually gets you through one.

Privacy and ads

Neither app shows you adverts. Kwit’s Play listing says plainly that “Kwit is free and ad-free”, and its Google Play data safety section says the app may collect personal info, app activity and device or other IDs, may share financial info and app performance data with third parties, encrypts data in transit, and lets you request deletion. Smoless has no ads in either tier and no advertising identifiers to send; your cigarette log stays on your device.

What the evidence says

Kwit has more research around it than almost any competitor, and it is worth being precise about what that research is. A pilot randomised trial, the Just Kwit! study at the University of Pittsburgh, published its protocol in 2019. The trial registry shows it completed in December 2019 with results posted in February 2021: 40 hospitalised young adults were randomised, 20 to Kwit and 20 to usual care, and by the one-month follow-up only 5 app users and 9 controls had answered. Its primary outcomes were feasibility measures such as ease of use. A study that size cannot tell you whether Kwit helps people quit, and we found no peer-reviewed results paper for it on PubMed as of 23 October 2026. Beyond that there is the 44-person gamification study above and a 2024 study of 2,331 people who installed Kwit on their own, which found that 4.7 percent of Premium users and 2 percent of free users finished its preparation programme and measured motivation rather than abstinence. Both have an author working for Kwit.

The listings also call Kwit “WHO-validated” on the App Store and “WHO-approved” on Google Play. Neither points to a WHO document and we did not find one, so we report the claim as the developer words it. Smoless, for its part, has published nothing at all, which we would rather say than imply otherwise. What is supported is the method: a Cochrane review of reduction-based quitting found that cutting down first works about as well as stopping abruptly, so choosing the gradual route does not cost you your chances. Our wider comparison covers the apps that do have completed trials, and what those trials really found.

Where we stand: we make Smoless. Kwit is stronger on cognitive behavioural content, on craving tools and breathing exercises, on having something to do in the app every day, and on research, thin as it is: it has a registered trial and published studies and we have none. It has been in the stores for over a decade and has tens of thousands of ratings to our handful. We think the measurement-first approach is the better bet for someone who is not yet ready to stop, but that is our judgement, not a finding.

Verdict by situation

• You have a quit date, or have already stopped, and want structure around staying stopped: Kwit.
• You still smoke most of what you used to and need the number down before you can face zero: Smoless, because Kwit does not taper cigarettes.
• Levels, achievements and a daily reason to open the app keep you going: Kwit.
• Streaks, resets and notifications have ended attempts before: Smoless, which has none of them.
• You are using patches or gum and want help reducing those on a schedule: Kwit, which has a mode for exactly that.
• You want the cheapest route: both are free to start; compare Kwit’s subscription against Smoless’s one-off lifetime price for your situation, and check the listings, because prices change.