05 Feb 2026
By Belle
Exist user survey 2025
The Exist user feedback survey from 2025 is all wrapped up, and it's time to summarise the results for another year.
We spent most of 2024 and the first half of 2025 working on our biggest redesign of Exist in many years. We rewrote both mobile apps from the ground up and updated the web app with a brand new design, a new app icon, and new features and content to make Exist more useful and easier to use. Because the redesign was in-progress at the end of 2024, our last user survey was completed in 2023, so we'll use those results to compare against.
Ways of finding Exist remained stable. Most users (31%) didn't remember how they found out about Exist, but among those who did remember, 24% found us by searching for something like Exist, 12% through a related service that we integrate with, and 7% each via Reddit and articles/blog posts.
Usage of our mobile apps was similar, though slightly higher on iOS than previous years. 49% of respondents use our iOS app, 42% use Exist for Android, and 5% use both. These numbers have tipped slightly in favour of iOS since 2023, when we had 46% on iOS, 44% on Android, and 6% using both. Only 4 people said they don't use our mobile apps at all, which has dropped further from the 9 people who chose this option in 2023.
We also asked about usage of our web app this year, because although our mobile apps are where Exist sees the most usage, the web app still has a lot of value, and it's interesting to see how much users get out of it. Usage of Exist on the web is quite spread out: 27% said they use Exist on the web daily, 17% use it at least weekly, and only 3% said they never use the web app at all. Other responses were "at least monthly" (16%), "a few times a year" (18%), and "only when necessary, for something the mobile apps can't do" at 20%.
Reasons for using Exist remained stable. "Seeking insights to understand or change my behaviour" remained the most popular reason for using Exist (48%), and "Keeping all my data in one place" was the second-most popular choice (31%), in keeping with the past few surveys.
Ways of using Exist were also similar to previous years. Manual data entry on the Review tab is most used for tracking data related to "emotions, mental health, or social interactions" (71%), "illness, symptoms, medication, or physical health" (61%), and "work, productivity, or other output (e.g. hobbies)" (51%). These numbers have all gone up slightly from 2023, but the order of the top 3 remains the same.
When asked about the 2025 redesign, users most liked seeing historical data for attributes on the mobile app's Browse tab (40%), new graphical content on the Home tab (35%), and the ability to pin attributes to the Home tab for quick access (28%). As always, it's impossible to please everyone with a big change, but only 9 people said they don't like how the new design looks, so we didn't upset too many people (but we are sorry to those users).
47% of users said they'd invested time into using the new subgroups feature for custom tags, though 33% didn't know this feature existed, so we may need to improve how we help new users discover all of Exist's features in future.
The biggest problems respondents have with Exist are again consistent with previous years: 35% said they want more data analysis, 23% want more integrations, and 17% said manually entering data is too much effort or too easy to forget.
While we don't ever plan to add "generative AI" features to Exist, we were curious about the general sentiment among Exist users about this trend. When asked about their feelings on genAI chatbots and "AI" features in apps (like summarising emails or generating code), with 5 choices ranging from "very negative" to "very positive," 46% chose a positive option, with 25% picking the most positive option. "Very negative" was the lowest response at 15%. In total, 35% chose a negative response, and 18% were neutral.
When asked about genAI features in regards to Exist specifically, 30% said they were glad Exist doesn't have genAI features, and 16% said they were very glad, because they feel very negative about genAI. That's 46% total who are happy we're not putting genAI features into Exist. 16% wish we'd reconsider our stance, with 8% already using a genAI service to analyse their Exist data. 23% said they don't mind either way, and a further 15% were mildly interested in the idea of Exist having genAI features.
When asked what we should focus on for 2026, Longer-term data analysis was the top choice again, though it dropped from 37% in 2023 to 32% in 2025. Second choice this time was more integrations or new attributes to sync automatically, at 31%, and more ways to view data in the mobile apps came in at 14%.
As always, thank you to every user who took the time to fill out the survey. It's helpful for us to gather feedback about how useful Exist is, and how we can improve it in future, and we always appreciate the notes of thanks, support, and encouragement included in the free-form responses.
2025's redesign included changes to content on the Home tab in our mobile apps which opens up new ways for us to surface interesting insights and trends in your data, which we'll continue to work on through 2026. We'll also keep exploring new ways to make Exist easier to use, and to help you dive into your data and explore it further.