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Watch the number go down. Every day, every app: your week against your average and the goal you chose.
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Serious? PRO fixes your limits and hours for 30 days. No edits, no extra minutes. The snail holds you to it.
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Set a daily limit for all your social apps, or one per app, plus the hours they can open. When time's up, they close.
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A small bubble floats over the feed with your time today and the posts you've seen. Hard to ignore, easy to read.
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Open Reels, Shorts, TikTok or X videos and the snail pulls you out. Your messages, photos and videos from friends stay.
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A small bubble floats over the feed with your time today and the posts you've seen. Hard to ignore, easy to read.
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One honest number: your time on social media today, and how many times the snail pulled you out of short videos.
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1024 x 1024 uncropped image of your app icon
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screenshot of your app WITHOUT device frames
Inspiration
I needed something to control my time on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is a HUGE problem in today’s society.
It’s easy to learn how to use social media, but it’s not easy to learn how to use it in a healthy way.
What it does
It provides the user with a full toolkit to control their consumption:
- Stop Infinite Scrolling: It creates a pagination concept where Cool Snail warns the user every 20 posts (on X, every 20 tweets, on Reddit, every 20 threads, etc.).
- Blocks Short Videos: On Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Users can still go to their friends’ profiles to see their content, but they can’t doomscroll.
- Time Controlling: This is the most common feature for social media control, but in our case, PRO users can’t change their limits, showing commitment. This works in a similar way to what some people do with a gym membership: they pay for the gym, and that forces them to go, but the other way around. This forces people not to go on social media. If they need extra time, they can get it by watching an add, this adds friction to users and make them think if they really need to access the social media app (this is why I believe I'm a candidate for Catvertising Award, as this is an innovative non-invasive way to show ads to users)
- Awareness: An always-visible bubble that counts not only the time spent, but also the posts viewed.
Overall, this apps try to help to solve the challenge of social media addiction, reason why I believe I can be a candidate for RevenueCat Peace Prize.
How we built it
I don’t know how to code, but I have 2 co-founders: Codex & Claude. Codex/ChatGPT have created the pet, the protagonist of our app: Cool Snail. A snail that used to be addicted to social media and now has other hobbies.
Google Stitch has helped me with the UI at the beginning. It can be considered another co-founder, but we fired it when Astra 5.5 was released. 3 days before Shipaton submissions closed, we changed the full UI.
In terms of stack, this is the feedback I got from my AI co-founders:
- The app is built in Kotlin, as a native Android app.
- (Obviously) RevenueCat for PRO and the paywall.
- Google AdMob for the "+5 min" ad, together with Google's consent form for Europe.
- OneSignal for notifications and the Gift email.
Challenges we ran into
- The learning curve of publishing an app. It was my first one, and there are nuances of Play Console that I was not expecting, such as needing 12 testers for 15 days.
- Accessibility rights: this app can only be built on Android, as it requires permission to get events from other apps. This is not allowed in the Apple world. That’s why I decided to focus on Android.
- Distribution: I haven’t started yet with that, because I tried to build in public, but I’m too shy/perfectionistic for that. After the hackathon, it will be time to get started with this.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Getting 20+ testers from family and friends was great! It was such a boost of energy. Sometimes as indie hacker we built stuff in our cave and we don't really show it to anyone. Google forced me to share my product to the world hahaha
- Finishing a project on time, finding time in day-to-day life to do this.
- Creating a promo video for Shipaton. I don’t like talking to the camera, and it has been a challenge. Especially sticking to the two-minute video limit and convincing my boyfriend to edit it (not easy at all).
What we learned
- Everything, but worth mentioning:
- OneSignal: it was sooooo easy to send notifications once the SDK was set up (this is why I believe I'm a candidate for Keep Them Coming Back Award)
- AdMob ads and RevenueCat Ads. It’s an interesting world that I want to dig into more.
What's next for Cool Snail: Block Apps & Reels
- Distribution, distribution, distribution and GTM. Full stop. The product is ready; now it’s time for the world to see it, for us to get feedback, and for us to iterate.
Built With
- android
- chatgpt
- claude
- codex
- google-admob
- kotlin
- lab
- onesignal
- revenuecat
- stitch
