Great! Apps like these are sorely needed. My feedback would be, apart from what others are saying about sub vs one-time purchase, to look at what Leechblock firefox extension is doing.
The key point is to make it harder (but not impossible) for me to use the phone. A "Do you need this?" is a great start, but since I can easily sneak by, I will soon do that. Even if I click "1 minute" to get a reminder, that should not be a simple notification, but back to the large big screen covering things.
What LB does is genius. You can enable a barrier so that if you reeeeeeally need to, you can get around, but it's annoying and time consuming, and thus the quick loop of "pick up phone and get stuck" is broken. The barrier in LB can be to type a (long) passphrase, or my favorite: a 64-char random string which cannot be copy-pasted. You need to manually look at 2-3 chars at a time and replicate the whole thing. Very effective.
But again, also the snap back to reality thing. If I keep using it, throw up a big overlay with a good question "Is your attention well spent?" for example. Make me wait before I can continue.
Advanced reminders are going to be a thing for the next big release. I agree that one problem is to pass the unlock, but staying on track with your intention is a different story. One periodical notification with static text can in theory fix that, but the chances are low in comparison to the full-screen pop-up. I intentionally focused on the unlock procedure first. For now, you can combine it with other apps like minimalistic launchers and apps that pop up after the app opens. But eventually, improving the reminder experience can make the solution more complete, I agree.
About typing "captcha" or random characters. I think it's just a different type of nudge. Another can be a small mini-game to play like catching a moving object. I'm going to consider adding different types of nudges to the app. Thanks for the suggestion.
One thing to consider, maybe open the app up for interaction with Tasker (being able to send events and provide actions to execute) - this will allow people to implement advanced logic on their own. If you expose user answering or skipping the screen as event, and ability to bring the screen back up as action, users[0] would be able to easily add features like "bring up Intenty screen when user attempts to open specific app or apps during work hours", or "make skipping require solving an ordinary differential equation shown rot13-encoded, and write down the answer in Klingon", or whatnot. That could be a good testbed for ideas to later incorporate into the app itself.
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[0] - Those that also use Tasker. I'd wager that for your target audience, the proportion of such users is much higher than in average case.
Just thinking about this, there might be room for a home launcher that helps manage attention this way. Probably more work than you are thinking of doing though.
I tried LeechBlock for a while and had that 64-char random string passphrase thing on. Turns out I became really quick at typing those 64 characters to get my dopamine fix.
You can make it up to 128 characters. That's impressive that you are able to type a random string of nonsense so fast.
My hack was to take a picture on my phone, have Apple's image recognition copy the string to my iCloud clipboard, and I'd paste it on my mac.
It's too easy to defeat the purpose of these things if you're even slightly driven.
> It's too easy to defeat the purpose of these things if you're even slightly driven.
Things like the OP and LeechBlock are tools for people who have already mostly conquered their addiction, to help keep them from relapsing. On their own, they're not sufficient to turn an addict into a non-addict.
May I ask you why you did install it in the first place, if you then hack your way around it?
Maybe the goal was to motivate you to find a hack anyway :)
Because I am not always driven to type 128 random characters or even use my phone camera, so it does successfully stop me from procrastinating much of the time.
The same thing will happen with this app. The user will select any answer to just do what they wanted to do.
Might I recommend charging? You get X for free, and then you pay a fee that grows.
And the fee gets deposited into a high-yield savings account of your choice, so you're paying yourself (it reminds me of those sites that allow you to make a "bet" to your friends that you'll (stop smoking/exercise more/lose weight/whatever) and if you don't do it then you have to pay your friends
> The key point is to make it harder (but not impossible) for me to use the phone.
All apps, and actually the phone manfacturers themselves make phones harder to use through user hostile patterns. Mandatory updates, re-logon, TOC confirmations, cookies, self promotions in the face, adverts, warnings, spray of notifications on marginal things, answering questions to important (or not) questions, selecting important (or not) huge amount of settings, suggestions (actually another self promotion mostly), update informations, etc. all make the phones as difficult to use as much those helps, or even more. For insane amount of money. Problem relocation machines they are.
I think you’ve nailed some really key points about breaking the "quick loop" of mindless phone use