I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qqlabs.min... which has several things that pester you when opening certain applications. It also makes the home screen quite dull. Combine this with a monochrome display and the phone considerably loosens its grip on you.
Cool idea. Amazingly they've found a way to put "in-app purchases" though.
This app could just be an image set as your lock screen background.
I've found a good way to discourage mindless phone staring is to set the display to monochrome (e.g. through colorblind emulation). The decreased visual stimulation seems to have an effect on me, at least until I want to see a photo or video in colour and go back to normal.
The "in-app purchases" are for small complementary features, like making the screen appear on a schedule, making it impossible to skip the screen, and adding a lock button to lock the screen. Those features aren't essential for the app to function.
> This app could just be an image set as your lock screen background.
Well, yes and no. In the app, you can interact with the prompts. There is a history of your itneraction. You can export it and then analyze it if needed.
> I've found a good way to discourage mindless phone staring is to set the display to monochrome (e.g. through colorblind emulation). The decreased visual stimulation seems to have an effect on me, at least until I want to see a photo or video in colour and go back to normal.
+1 here. I have always had this setting on closer to bedtime.
The point is, everyone believes all apps should be free when this developer spent time building, testing, and iterating to come out with quite the useful app. And the developer respects users, so they chose to monetize in a way that doesn’t collect our data or shove ads in our faces.
It is totally fair to charge for work you've done - but then again, in my opinion, not everything needs to be built with some profit in mind (not talking about this app in particular now).
I think it's really refreshing to find an app that doesn't lock any features behind a paywall or makes using it more cumbersome unless you pay. I'm mostly okay with one-time payments though.
Just because you invested some time into making a project doesn't mean that you absolutely need to make some money to make it "worth" it. Hell, most open-source software is built on free/voluntary labor.
> not everything needs to be built with some profit in mind (not talking about this app in particular now).
I agree, and I make many projects for fun and find it rewarding when others use what I've built. But that is a decision that I make myself, for my own work. I never feel like I have the right to tell others whether they should build something with profit in mind or not.
I understand the sentiment from a user's perspective, I really do.
I have been totally burned out by having to maintain all my free apps in the Play Store though, lately. Even a simple non-internet-using app needs an update every year and needs to comply with new bullshit policies every few months. It has totally changed my opinion on free vs paid apps. I still despise subscription models, but I absolutely understand that there's just no free apps out there anymore. It just costs too much of my time to keep doing it for free.
How would you suggest to compensate devs for developing and maintaining such apps?
Personally I would much prefer that developers lock poweruser features behind a paywall rather than plaster ugly ads all over the place. Making it a paid app works too, but likely 95% of the potential userbase would not try the app if they had to reach for their wallets first.
> Amazingly they've found a way to put "in-app purchases" though.
I've been so happy slowly going through my phone and removing every single app on my phone that has either ads or in-app purchases. I don't miss a single one.
same thing worked for me. on iphone, ios 18 introduced a way to apply shades to everything, including app icon and notification counters. since i made the entire thing darker, i've stopped using instagram. i couldn't believe that such a small thing could do wonders. probably the same thing can be achieved by disabling the notification counter, but i think it's better to have it when you want to look for it, but make it not pop out into your eyes.
Great app, but I second the lifetime price request. It's a bit weird for me to see a subscription for such an app. I'm happy to support the developer, but not on a monthly basis.
Great app! Love the design and thoughts behind it. Few comments:
- isn't it possible to select multiple intentions? I've tried but when I turn on one, another one turns off.
- for apps like these I'm really missing a more expensive lifetime subscription. I'm okay with paying some more upfront if I don't have to pay a periodical fee.
> - isn't it possible to select multiple intentions? I've tried but when I turn on one, another one turns off.
Here is the place where I made a UX mistake. I implemented nudges in a similar way as "modes" on iOS or routines on Samsung phones. You can enable one at a time. If you want to customise the content you see, you have to customise it inside nudge, not by enabling another one. I didn't make any UX tests before releasing this and I see a lot of confusion here. Apologise for that.
> for apps like these I'm really missing a more expensive lifetime subscription. I'm okay with paying some more upfront if I don't have to pay a periodical fee.
That's another miscalculation I made :) But I already have plans to replace the subscription with one-time purchase. Again sorry for the inconvenience.
I feel like we're far too obsessed with the "nobility" of stuff we do for fun. Watch YouTube shorts, scroll reddit, whatever.
It's only "addictive" because it's fun, it's no more pointless than anything else you might do for fun. What are you really achieving by using this app? Do you have an unhealthy relationship with your phone, or are you just arbitrarily ranking it low on the "worthiness" of random shit you might choose to do to kill some time.
What I'm trying to achieve here is to make more conscious choices.
If I want to scroll Reddit, I would like to make a deliberate decision rather than doing it habitually in an "uncontrolled" way, just immediately out of boredom.
The app intervenes in this unconscious phone pickup habit loop and prompts me to reconsider this.
I'm not deleting social media apps from the device and I believe we shouldn't. I'm just trying to adjust the way how I reach them.
A lot of people doing the scrolling thing seem not satisfied with this. Listening to them, it seems they feel like it not only kills their time funnily, it actually goes beyond, and kills their time more they wanted will still not being so enjoyable.
So they are trying to find hacks to counter their habits.
I can relate. Sometimes I'm on HN a bit more longer than ideal. But that's not a big issue for me and it's not very often so I'm not finding a fix for this.
This is not true. Almost everything in mobile phones exploit human brain biases to keep us hooked. It's about regaining control of what you want to use your time for.
i don't have phone problems, but I do think there is a non-arbitrary worthiness scale to things I do for fun. In the long term, I think I benefit more and feel better about myself for spending time learning something or creating something than playing video games or doing something passive.
I swear comments on posts like this one always read like some religious support group for people that think sex outside of the context of marriage is worthy of shame. It's depressing.
For me the only really useful intervention was getting a black and white e-ink Android smartphone. I started to read a book per month and my short video watching time was decimated.
I got the Bigme Hibreak which isn’t the worst, but lacks recent android versions. Gives me hours of my life back every day, compared to the phone addiction I experience with my lcd colour screen smartphone
> Have you tried RescueTime? It's a similar app that prompts you to log your activities every time you unlock your phone.
I didn't know they had such a feature. I'm going to check this out.
> It's surprising to see how much time can slip by unnoticed each day. Using it can really make you more mindful of how you're spending it.
Exactly. I have so many unnecessary phone pickups during the day. Without such apps that would slip unnoticed. Also, it's worth mentioning that when you notice those moments at least in my case it makes you feel guilty a bit that you picking it up unconsciously, but maybe that's my individual behaviour.
I haven't seen any of those apps (or built-in OS features like screen time on iOS) not become useless in a matter of days.
People that will use their phone for distraction (which I don't think there's actually anything wrong with) will take only a few days to get "notification fatigue" from those screens and automatically bypass them without even thinking about it.
I get that you can prevent bypassing the screen as you mentioned as an extra feature but people will just click the other button then.
There's not a single person (myself included) I have seen use screen time not automatically bypass the limitation instantly as it pops up.
What I'm trying to achieve here with the app is to give a set of tools that can help deal with this fatigue. Like adding a variety to the texts you see, changing the intensity of the pop-up screen, adding cooldown, or hard mode and schedules.
The Northstar is to adjust the nudge automatically based on the level of fatigue from the screen.
I know I'm far from it now. But I'm attempting. I'm changing the nudges often and their configuration manually for myself now. And it works for me and I believe it can help other folks as well.
> There's not a single person (myself included) I have seen use screen time not automatically bypass the limitation instantly as it pops up.
You can take the more drastic approach and lock yourself out of your phone by changing it's unlock code and use a timelock [0] to prevent yourself from bypassing it for a given time. Works also with parental-control like Apps that require you to enter a password/code to unlock. No bypassing here.
The point is that people don't stick with it. Bypassable versions works just as well as this, for a day or two until it becomes slightly annoying. Full lockout will work for a day or two as well, until it becomes annoying. The bypass here is simply that you never use it again.
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