Some milestones are about money. This one is about minutes, 1.76 billion of them, spent by people around the world quietly building skills to look after their own minds and mental health.
Smiling Mind, the Australian mental fitness charity co-founded by Jane Martino, is about to cross 10 million downloads of its free app globally. Since launching in 2012, users have completed more than 82 million mental fitness sessions, and nearly half of every download, 46.9%, has come from right here in Australia. Behind the numbers sits something simple and a little remarkable: the app has reached 14.7 million children and young people, supported 678,000 parents, and never made a single dollar of profit, by design, a genuinely unusual position to hold in a wellness app market that has increasingly leaned on subscriptions and premium tiers.
Long before mental health apps became a crowded category, Smiling Mind was quietly doing the groundwork, putting evidence-based tools directly into people’s hands, for free, well before that was the expected model. Psychologists and educators built the program from the ground up, and it now spans meditations as short as one minute through to fuller sessions of 40 minutes or more, covering everything from sleep and stress to relationships, mindful eating and managing technology use. Users can build their own routines by mixing and matching sessions, track their mood through regular wellbeing check-ins, download content for offline use, and watch their progress build through an in-app mental fitness tracker. The app also offers meditations in three Indigenous Australian languages – Kriol, Ngaanyatjarra and Pitjantjatjara – alongside dedicated programs for schools, workplaces and sport, reflecting an ambition that stretches well beyond a single demographic or use case.
The organisation has always bet that prevention matters as much as crisis response, that building mental fitness early deserves just as much investment as treating a problem once it’s already taken hold. That philosophy shows up in the age range of its reach too: Smiling Mind designs content specifically for children as young as seven as well as adults, and backs its programs with a six-year mindfulness curriculum that teachers can bring directly into the classroom. The whole approach rests on a five-skill Mental Fitness Model, built on the idea that mental fitness, like physical fitness, is a habit people form best early rather than a fix they reach for in crisis.
That bet is paying off in scale, but the next chapter is about connection. Smiling Mind’s focus now is building a mental fitness ecosystem that links school and home, so children and families can build healthy habits in the same language, wherever they happen to be. It’s an ambitious next step for an organisation that has always measured success less in revenue and more in minutes spent, sessions completed, and young people given tools before they hit a crisis point.
Keeping that access free isn’t a given, though. Smiling Mind is currently calling on corporate Australia and the wider community to help fund its next phase, with a goal of raising $50,000 by 30 June. An app that has already helped the country spend the equivalent of over three thousand years on collective wellbeing, and has never charged its users a cent, deserves a fairly reasonable ask in return.
