Freedom Lives Outside

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  Onboarding 1

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  Onboarding 2

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  Pigeons flying in front of the screen to break phone addiction

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  App Icon 1024x1024

Inspiration

Freedom Lives Outside started from a simple observation: mindless phone use often happens automatically. You open one app, keep scrolling, switch to another, and suddenly much more time has passed than you intended.

Most screen-time tools rely on limits, statistics, or blocking apps entirely. I wanted to try something lighter and more playful: interrupt the habit at the moment it is happening and create a small opportunity to make a different choice.

That is where the pigeons came from.

What it does

Freedom Lives Outside detects longer phone sessions and sends pigeons flying across the screen.

The pigeons are deliberately hard to ignore, but they do not immediately block what you are doing. Tapping one opens the app and gives you a choice: step outside or complete a small task away from your current phone activity.

The idea is not to punish phone use. It is to create a brief interruption between an automatic action and the next one.

As a phone session continues, more pigeons appear in several waves, making the intervention gradually harder to overlook.

How I built it

Freedom Lives Outside is built for Android.

Android allows the app to display pigeons over other apps using an Accessibility-based overlay. The app tracks the duration of the current phone session and triggers several configurable pigeon waves.

I also built the interaction that follows after tapping a pigeon. Users can choose GO OUTSIDE or a small task, followed by a short timed screen designed to keep the interruption going long enough to break the immediate scrolling loop.

The pigeon behavior, timing, number of pigeons, movement speed, and wave configuration can be adjusted through an internal debug system, which made it much easier to test different versions of the intervention.

Challenges

The biggest challenge was creating an intervention that works across the Android system without making the phone unusable.

Displaying animated pigeons over other apps required working with Android Accessibility services, overlays, foreground behavior, and phone-session tracking.

Another challenge was finding the right balance between interruption and annoyance. Too few pigeons are easy to ignore, while too many immediately feel like punishment. I experimented with multiple waves, different movement speeds, random directions, and increasing numbers of pigeons as a session continues.

The interaction also had to remain extremely simple. If stopping the interruption requires navigating through several menus, the intervention itself becomes another piece of screen time.

What I learned

Building Freedom Lives Outside taught me a lot about Android system overlays, Accessibility services, phone-session tracking, foreground services, and designing interactions that can work on top of other apps.

More importantly, I learned that designing a digital wellbeing tool is less about adding features and more about timing. An intervention can be very small, but it has to appear at the right moment.

Freedom Lives Outside is my experiment in making that interruption visible, slightly absurd, and hopefully useful.

Sometimes all it takes to interrupt a scrolling session is a pigeon.

Built With

• flutter
• hermes
• kotlin