The Happiness Project vs hool
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
The Happiness Project
Engage in short, enjoyable mini-games designed by scientists to contribute to real psychological and neuroscience research. Your gameplay and anonymous survey responses help study well-being, anxiety, and depression.
- Play mini-games for science
- Contribute to psychology research
- Study neuroscience of well-being
- Anonymous surveys
- Understand mental health
- Citizen science project
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Play fun mini-games to help brain scientists study the psychology and neuroscience of well-being! Created by scientists at UCL and Yale, this app is a citizen science project taking psychology and neuroscience experiments from the lab to your smartphone. Every 3-minute game that you finish contributes data to real scientific research about how the brain works. The anonymous surveys help us see what causes well-being and understand mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Be part of a unique citizen science experiment and help us write the equation for happiness! Dr Robb Rutledge (Yale Psychology) says: "We all want to know what determines happiness. It’s hard to figure it out! In our games, we ask people about their happiness as they make decisions in different situations. We hope people enjoy our app and help us answer some really important scientific questions!" This citizen science project was supported by the UK Medical Research Council.
hool
A strategic four-player card game where partners compete to win tricks. Players bid on contracts and the declarer aims to fulfill their bid while opponents try to stop them.
- Four-player partnership gameplay
- Bidding for contracts
- Trick-taking mechanics
- Trump and No Trump options
- Three distinct game stages
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HOOL is a card game played by 4 players sitting in North, East, South and West seats. North and South are partners playing against East and West. The game goes in three stages. In the first stage, all players share two pieces of information about their hand. In the second stage, there is an auction to determine which player has bid the highest (for the total number of tricks and whether in Trump or No Trump). The highest bidder is known as the declarer. The third stage is the play of the cards where the declarer tries to make his contract while the defenders try to deny him.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: hool at 100% against The Happiness Project's 33%. The Happiness Project's advantage is rating (3.9 vs 3.3) and ratings volume (42 vs 3). On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
The Happiness Project holds the better App Store score, 3.9 against 3.3. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: The Happiness Project has 42 ratings behind it against 3, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 33% of The Happiness Project's written reviews are positive against 100% of hool's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
The Happiness Project ships an update every 5 months, hool every 4 months. Both last shipped on October 24, 2026.
| Parameter | The Happiness Project | hool |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 3.9 (42 ratings) — better | 3.3 (3 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 33.3% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 42 — better | 3 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 months | Every 4 months — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 13.0 | 12.4 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 99 MB | 17 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | UCL | amaresh deshpande |
Customer experience
The Happiness Project
hool
In-app purchases
The Happiness Project
No in-app purchases
hool
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is The Happiness Project free?
Is hool free?
Which has better reviews, The Happiness Project or hool?
Do The Happiness Project or hool have ads?
Which is updated more often, The Happiness Project or hool?
Other comparisons
