Paff
How Paff works
Paff is a companion for quitting smoking. It is built on one idea: your progress only ever climbs.
1. It starts with your pattern
Most quit apps hand everyone the same advice. Paff starts by learning when and where you smoke. You can spend a week noting each cigarette before you quit, or quit now and let the app learn from the cravings you bring to it. On day seven you get your trigger map: your hardest hours, your usual places, what tends to set you off. The map belongs to you and you can see it any time.
2. A plan built from that map, not a template
Your plan is written from your own map: if-then moves for your riskiest windows, a kit for the hardest hour of the day, and a record of what got you through last time. Every suggestion is an offer, never an instruction. You decide what to try.
3. A coach for the moment a craving hits
When a craving comes, the coach is one tap away. It knows your pattern and the reasons you gave for quitting, and it talks like someone who gets you: it reads the moment first, then helps. It might steady you, put today on the usual arc of quitting, or offer one small next step. It never lectures, never cheers emptily, and never gives medical advice. If you would rather not talk, the free tools are always there: a breathing exercise and a timer to ride the urge out.
4. Progress you can't lose
Your day count, the money you have kept, your milestones and your companion's garden all keep climbing on the clock. A slip is information, not a reset. We built it this way because the single biggest reason people abandon quit apps is watching a counter go back to zero.
Where the ideas come from
Paff is informed by established research traditions in behaviour change, and it is honest about the difference between being informed by them and being them.
- Motivational Interviewing (Miller & Rollnick). The coach reflects what you say, affirms the concrete things you did, and draws on your own reasons rather than supplying reasons you should have.
- Relapse prevention (Marlatt). Urge surfing, naming your high-risk situations, and building a coping plan you wrote yourself.
- Brief intervention frameworks (the FRAMES model, the US Public Health Service guideline). A menu of options over a prescription; the responsibility, and the credit, stay with you.
The coach takes inspiration from these approaches. It is not a counselling session and it does not run a clinical protocol.
What Paff is not
- It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition, and it does not promise a success rate.
- It does not give medical, psychiatric or pharmacological advice. Questions about nicotine replacement or medication belong with a clinician, and the coach will say so.
- It does not replace care from a doctor, a counsellor or an evidence-based cessation programme. It can sit alongside them.
- Recovery milestones in the app describe what typically happens for people who stop smoking, drawn from published population data. They are not predictions about your body.
- If you write something that suggests you are in crisis, the app steps aside and shows you a local crisis line before anything else happens: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, 112 in Türkiye.
Your data
You use Paff without an account, and it asks for your consent before it saves your quit data. What you note and what you say to the coach never goes into analytics or crash reports. We do read coach conversations, under your anonymous ID only, to make the coach better. You can delete everything from Settings at any time. The details are in the Privacy Policy and the Explicit Consent Notice.
Sources
- Miller, W. R. & Rollnick, S. (2012). Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Marlatt, G. A. & Donovan, D. M. (2005). Relapse Prevention (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Fiore, M. C. et al. (2008). Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: 2008 Update. US Public Health Service.
- Whittaker, R. et al. Smartphone applications for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.