Bara | Devpost

Inspiration

We spend too much time on social media, and most screen time tools are easy to ignore. I wanted to make focus feel personal and accountable by tying it to a virtual pet you care about.

What it does

Bara is a capybara focus companion with a health meter. Users pick distracting apps and set a usage threshold. When the threshold is reached, those apps are blocked. To get extra time, users must request a Friend Pass from a paired friend. If approved, they get more minutes, but their Bara health and score go down.

How we built it

I built Bara in Swift and SwiftUI following MVVM architecture, Apple’s Screen Time APIs, and Supabase for pairing, friend requests, and realtime sync.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges were Apple entitlements, extension configuration, and limited documentation around Screen Time APIs. I also had to debug widget and app group behavior across simulator and physical devices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to ship a functional application with real app blocking, friend-approved time extensions, realtime request flow, and a polished UI with onboarding, stats, and a live pet system.

What we learned

As this was my first hackathon, I learned a lot about how to work effectively under tight time constraints. I had to prioritize features carefully, focus on what would deliver the most impact, and be willing to move on quickly when something was taking too long. Through the process, I also learned a lot about the the Widget framework.

What's next for Bara

Next, we want to add smarter health balancing, streaks and rewards, better friend mechanics, richer analytics, notifications, and production hardening for reliability and scale.