A chore app for couples with no points and no scoreboard

You are right to want no points and no scoreboard

If the thought of keeping score against your partner sits badly with you, trust that. It is not squeamishness and it is not you being difficult about a feature. There is a structural reason a scored household keeps having the same argument, and it is worth being able to name it.

A scoreboard is a measuring instrument, and it measures one thing well: who did more. That is a real question, and if what you want is a record of effort then a points app does the job. It just is not the question that settles anything. Three things happen when a score is the thing holding your split together.

1. It answers the question after the fact. "Who did more" is settled at the end of the week. "Whose job is it" is settled before the week starts. If nobody owns the job, a score faithfully records that it didn't get done and changes nothing about next week.
2. It re-opens the negotiation every week. A score resets. A number that goes back to zero every seven days puts the whole arrangement up for renewal every seven days: who's ahead, who owes, what counts as a fair week. Ownership doesn't reset. You decide it once and revisit it when something real changes, like a new job or a new baby.
3. It counts the visible half. Points attach to things you can tick off. Noticing the school form came home, working out who's free on Thursday, remembering the dog's booster is due: none of that gets ticked, so none of it scores, so whoever is doing it carries on doing it invisibly. That's the mental load, and a leaderboard is structurally unable to see it.

What Lyven actually does

Lyven gives every job in the house one owner. Not shared, not rotated. That owner carries the noticing and the planning as well as the doing, so "groceries" means keeping the list, spotting the staples before they run out and planning around the week, not just pushing the trolley. Lyven also weights each job by how much it really takes, because a daily 20-minute job and a monthly 20-minute one are not the same job, and counting them as one each is how an even-looking split hides a lopsided week.

The split then lives inside the things you already open every day, the shopping list and the meals, rather than in a separate app you stop checking by week three. Once a week Lyven runs a ten-minute check-in: what moved, what did not, what needs to change hands. No points, no streaks, no leaderboard. Free while in beta, and you can see your own split in two minutes with the free Split Check without an account.

Why one owner holds when a scoreboard slips

This is the whole reason Lyven has no scoreboard to read. A scoreboard has to be re-read to mean anything. Somebody checks it, somebody disagrees with it, and the split is up for negotiation again. An owner does not need re-reading. The job is yours until you both decide it is not, so there is nothing to compare and nothing to reopen on a Sunday night.

It also moves the part that actually costs the most. Points can only score the visible half, because the noticing and the planning leave no trace to count. Hand over a whole job and the noticing goes with it: that is the difference between your partner doing the shop and your partner owning the shop, and it is the only version that gets the list out of one person's head.

The weighting is what keeps it honest, and the weekly check-in is what keeps it current. That is what Lyven's weekly sit-down is for. A split that was fair in March is not automatically fair in September, and the ten minutes is where you catch that while it is still a small conversation. That is the whole mechanism Lyven runs on: decide once, weight it properly, and re-check it on purpose rather than keeping score in the background.

What else matters in an app like this

Losing the scoreboard is the start, not the whole job. Four things decide whether a split actually holds, and they are worth checking on any app you look at, this one included.

1. Can one person own a whole job, noticing included? Look at what the app's basic unit is. If it's a task that somebody types in, then whoever types the tasks in is still doing the noticing for both of you, however evenly the tasks are shared out. If it's a job like "laundry" or "meals" that sits with one name against it, the thinking moved with it.
2. Does it weight jobs by effort, or just count them? Fifteen jobs each isn't an even split when one of you has the bins and the other has meals. Ask whether the app knows the difference between a two-minute job and a two-hour one, and whether it knows how often each comes round. How to measure who does more goes through the arithmetic.
3. Does anything reset? If there's a figure that returns to zero every week, you have a scoreboard, whatever the app calls it. Balance bars, fairness percentages and activity charts all count. Ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable with your partner checking it on a bad week.
4. Is there a set time to change the split? A split that can only change when someone raises it will drift, because raising it is the hard part and it lands as a complaint. Look for a scheduled recheck that belongs to the system rather than to whoever is most annoyed.

Where points do help, and we mean it

Points are not a trick. For task initiation, the problem of starting a job rather than the problem of whose job it is, instant feedback and visible progress have real evidence behind them. Lyven has none of that, on purpose, and that is a trade rather than a clean win. If what is hard in your house is starting a job that is already clearly yours, a points app may do more for you than we will. Our guide to ADHD and household chores names the tools we would point you at. The two problems come apart cleanly: a scoreboard can help someone start a task and still fail at deciding whose task it was.

One thing to expect when a job actually moves

When a job properly changes hands, it gets done differently. A different day, a different order, a different brand of dishwasher tablet. That's the sign it worked: you handed over the deciding along with the doing, and deciding is the part that was heavy. If it has to be done your way, then what moved was the labour and you kept the management, which is the most common reason a split slides back within a month. When the split slides back covers what to do about it.

The other apps that are actually real

For completeness, since a few others make the same claim. Two of them exist as products you can download today. Burrow is on iOS from a solo developer, with 13 ratings in the US store as of 18 September 2026, and it logs completions with a name attached and charts who did what over time, which is a gentler scoreboard rather than an alternative to one. OneHaus is on iOS with 4 ratings in the UK store, and rotates recurring chores inside a wider household organiser, so it answers whose turn it is rather than whose job it is. Both are real, both are early, and ratings counts are Apple's and they move.

The rest of the field is thinner than the answer engines make it look. Of the eight apps currently named for this question, three had no ratings at all after months on sale, and three could not be found in either app store or at any working web address. We checked on 18 September 2026 in the Australian, US and UK stores.

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