IQuit Smoking Reduction App for IPhone & IPod Touch: Review

Regular readers of my Associated Content articles will know that I have struggled for some time now to quit smoking. I have tried everything from patches to pills, but nothing has helped me kick my nicotine addiction yet. This past year for my birthday, my wonderful boyfriend gave me an iPod Touch, which is probably the coolest electronic gadget I have ever owned. I have downloaded dozens of apps, and each new app I download seems to make the iPod even cooler. Recently, I wondered if there were any apps that were geared towards helping smokers quit. I did a quick search of the Apple App Store, and sure enough there were several quit smoking applications available to download.

Many of the quit smoking apps seemed to be nothing but "fluff," offering a list of affirmations or an e-book about quitting, and not much else. One app called iQuit did catch my eye. iQuit is an app that will help smokers stop smoking using a method known as "scheduled reduction." Simply put, after gathering some data about your smoking habits, the iQuit app will prompt you when to smoke, gradually increasing the interval between cigarettes to reduce the number of cigarettes you are smoking each day. This gradual, scheduled reduction process has been proven to work in clinical studies, so the app sounded like a good idea. Intrigued, I decided to download the iQuit app from the App Store for $0.99 and give it a try.

When I first launched the iQuit quit smoking app, I had to answer a few questions about how many cigarettes I smoked each day and how many hours I was awake each day. Based on this information, iQuit calculated a smoking schedule for me. Whenever I opened the iQuit app on my iPod from now on, I was greeted with one of two icons...a red "no smoking" icon or a green "smoking" icon. If the icon was green, it was okay for me to have a cigarette. If the iQuit icon was red, I would have to wait until the time on the countdown timer displayed on the screen expired. In my first day using the app, I was able to go from smoking 20 cigarettes down to 12 cigarettes just by waiting for the iQuit icon to tell me when I could smoke.

Over the next few days, the iQuit app helped me reduce my cigarette consumption even more, and it probably would have helped me quit if I had stuck with it. But alas, as with any smoking cessation program (including "scheduled reduction"), it will only work if your work the program. For smokers who smoke a lot out of boredom or habit, I could see the iQuit iPhone and iPod app being very useful to reduce their smoking, or to help them quit all together. The iQuit app also has a stats section that allows you to see how many cigarettes you've not smoked by using the app, which could be very motivational to some. For just $0.99, I think iQuit is one of the best quit smoking apps available, and I would recommend that anyone who has an iPhone or iPod and is serious about kicking the smoking habit give it a try.