friends67

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  App Icon

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  times up? ask your friends

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  finally an app that works against doomscrolling

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  take back the years you scrolled away

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  soft or hardcore: you choose how strict

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  your friends keep you accountable

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  lock in together, phones down

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  Home screen

Inspiration

Hey, we're Vitor and Derya.

Before friends67 existed, Derya had a spine surgery to remove a tumor. She really didn't know if she'd wake up. When she did, the first thing she felt was anger, at every hour she had scrolled away.

We looked around. Our friends hated scrolling too, but they were spending 6 to 7 hours a day on it. That's more than a third of your waking life. The problem was everywhere we looked: doctors, people on the subway, coworkers, even our mums, and it affected them mentally. We knew we had to fix it.

10,000 km away in Brazil, Vitor had found a security hole in a school's system and, instead of exploiting it, reported it and posted about it on Reddit. Derya was looking for someone who loved building and solving problems for humanity as much as her. Vitor was that and a good human being. She read his post, sent him a message, and that's where the story began.

friends67 gave us and our loved ones our lives back. NO ONE WAS BORN TO SCROLL THEIR LIFE AWAY. WE ARE SAVING NOW EVERYONE ELSE

What it does

Every tool we tried ran on willpower, and willpower loses against an algorithm built by thousands of engineers. So we asked: what's stronger than the algorithm? Human shame.

1. Pick your apps and a daily limit.
2. When time's up, those apps lock. You cant unlock it without your friends noticing.
3. Want more time? Take a selfie, write why, and send it to a friend: "just 15 min, promise."

You choose how strict it is:

• Soft mode: the selfie is enough. Your friends see the request, and having to send it is often enough to put the phone down.
• Hardcore mode: a friend has to say yes. No yes, no scrolling.

Ask yourself: would you still go over your limit if you had to send your best friend a selfie and wait for them to approve 15 more minutes? Almost everyone we asked said no. That's the whole product. The algorithm can hack your brain. It can't hack your friends.

Friends can also lock in together: start a phone-free session for studying or a night out, your apps stay blocked until the timer ends, the session chat fills up with selfies instead of feeds.

How we built it

When Derya asked him to come to Berlin, Vitor booked a flight that week. He left his university, his job, his family, his friends and his culture behind. It was his first time in Europe. He moved into her home, and we have worked at the same table ever since.

Derya shapes the vision, designed every screen and distributes it. Vitor engineered everything else, and he did it twice: blocking apps has no cross-platform shortcut, so friends67 is fully native on both platforms, and each one came with its own fight.

• iPhone: Swift and SwiftUI, on Apple's Screen Time API.
• Android: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with a background service that watches which app is open.
• Backend: TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 for data and R2 for selfies.
• RevenueCat for subscriptions, Firebase for push.

We take it to people through social media and face to face at universities and schools. Shipaton brought us together.

Challenges we ran into

Leaving home. Vitor's family, his friends and everything familiar stayed in Brazil, five hours behind.

Living in the office. When your home and your company are the same room, the workday has no end. We had to grow each day to solve a problem that is bigger than ourselves. BTW we also had to learn when to close the laptop :D

Building everything twice. By the time the Android app worked, we had to start again on iPhone, where almost nothing we had learned applied. Our streetinterviews showed us that friends dont use the same device so we needed both, Apple and Android. Apple's Screen Time API sits deep in iOS and we hit wall after wall. Apple once rejected a build for five reasons at once. We fixed all five and sent it back two days later.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• friends67 is live on the App Store and Google Play! With RevenueCat subscriptions from day one.
• The people who use it, use it a lot.
  • already 323 active users in the last 28 days
  • 618 requests for more screen time
  • 29% of people chose Hardcore mode, where only a friend can unlock more time.
  • 43% of accounts are connected to at least one friend, and friends have answered requests 120 times.
  • 23 group lock-in sessions and 121 direct messages between friends.
• People tell us it works. From our App Store reviews:

"great concept, idea that I have to ask for permission instead of skipping my screen time limit works much better for me. also the interface and user experience are very friendly" anacarolferr

"Helps to reduce screentime from doomscrolling and gets me back to interaction with real world friends highly recommend it!" S!mon

• We are our own users. We use friends67 on each other.
• We built it with people. When we were stuck, we just talked to people. We did more than 100 interviews face to face, and one thing kept coming up: the shame of asking a friend is what makes it work. Soft and Hardcore mode both came out of those conversations.
• Most important: us. No big team, no big money. Just two people shipping every day and changing the world for the better.

What we learned

• Shame is the feature, not the lock. We expected the friend's approval to do the work. Then we noticed the selfie alone was already cutting scrolling, so we split the product into Soft and Hardcore.
• Our onboarding made sense only to us. People didn't get it, and we couldn't see why from inside the apartment. So we went out on the street, handed people the app, asked where they got lost and shipped the fix within a day.
• Solve it for yourself first. If nothing out there works, keep going until something works for you. Then try it on your friends. If it works for them, go talk to strangers. If they say yes too, you've really solved a problem and changed someones life!

What's next for friends67

The people we interview want this for much more than social media. Anywhere a person is up against an algorithm, a friend can be the counterweight. We see friends67 as the start of human-centered tech in the AI era.

In May, Paul Graham wrote that Steve Jobs would have had the moral authority to face what phones are doing to us, and that he doubts anyone in the phone business now does. We're not Steve Jobs. But we are alive, and we are fixing it.

Next up: a US campus university tour in october just like facebook did back in the day. Derya booked already her flights to San Francisco. More UGC Creators, Student Ambassodors at each University and the features our users keep asking for.

Built With

• claude
• cloudflare
• firebase
• github
• magic-patterns
• revenue-cat
• sqlite
• swift
• typescript