NoMo Phone

Focus, earn, build: qualifying completed sessions earn coins toward your next village addition.
Quiet Hours: scheduled app blocking for a calmer routine. An optional NoMo Premium feature.
Meet your animal neighbours. Companions unlock through focus progress.
See your focus time add up and make room for what matters.
Choose a sound and settle in. Free ambient sounds; sound mixing is available with NoMo Premium.
Choose distracting apps and keep them blocked during your focus session with Apple Screen Time permission.
Choose a home, colours and placement. Some designs require NoMo Premium plus earned coins.
A little world built by focus. Example village showing earned progress and optional Premium content.
NoMo app icon — original, uncropped 1024 × 1024 artwork.
Actual NoMo timer UI · browser capture · no device frame · 1179 × 2556 pixels.

A little world, built by putting your phone down

NoMo turns completed focus time into a village you can make your own. Block distracting apps, spend time on something that matters, and come back with coins for a new home, a garden, or a place for your animal neighbours to meet.

The reward for using NoMo is time spent away from it.

Inspiration

I built NoMo because I kept reaching for my phone without even thinking about it. Screen-time numbers told me where my time had gone, but they gave me very little to look forward to. I wanted something to show for the time I got back.

That became the idea behind NoMo: let a small, personal world grow out of the moments you choose to spend studying, working, reading, or simply being present.

What it does

The core loop is simple: choose your distractions → focus → earn coins → build your village.

Protect your focus. Choose apps to block using Apple's Screen Time permission, then start a timed or count-up session. The timer also works without blocking permission.
Make progress tangible. Qualifying completed sessions earn coins you can save for homes, gardens, and village details. Arrange your buildings and choose their colours.
Meet your neighbours. Work toward animal companions and new island regions as you progress. Residents wander through the world you are building.
Find your rhythm. Ambient sounds, focus insights, and a private, device-local journal support the habit around the timer.

Core app blocking and focus sessions are free. Optional NoMo Premium adds website blocking, scheduled Quiet Hours, full insights, weekly Field Notes, additional village designs, and sound mixing. Premium designs can also require earned coins; membership does not replace the time needed to progress.

How I built it

NoMo combines React and TypeScript with Capacitor and custom Swift integrations for Apple's Screen Time APIs, widgets, and Live Activities. Three.js and React Three Fiber render the island; Supabase supports accounts and synced progress.

RevenueCat powers purchases, restores, and Premium access. Contextual paywalls explain the benefit where it becomes relevant: someone choosing a Premium building sees the island offering; someone exploring deeper insights sees the focus offering. Monthly, annual, and one-time Founder Lifetime options support different preferences.

The important engineering work sits between those pieces. A completed session has to become saved progress. A building purchase has to respect ownership, coin balance, and placement rules. Closing a paywall should return someone to the design they were working on.

Challenges

A focus app has to remain dependable when the phone is locked, an app is interrupted, or a purchase is restored. I spent substantial effort on session state, native integration, persistence, and the boundaries between earned progress and paid access.

The creative challenge was making a village feel alive. Buildings alone were not enough: terrain, paths, lighting, and animal movement had to work together. Residents needed to move around the homes people placed while the world stayed responsive on a phone.

What I am most proud of

The visuals, and the way everything connects. Warm windows, small gardens, winding paths, and neighbours gathering together make the island feel like somewhere you would enjoy making your own.

But the detail that matters most is what those places represent. A new home can be the result of an evening spent studying. A garden can mark the time you finally made for a book. The world becomes a visible record of effort that would otherwise disappear into a timer history.

NoMo is live on the App Store. Shipping the full loop—from protecting a session to returning to something you have earned—is the accomplishment I care about most.

What I learned

People need to understand what they are working toward, see their progress, and trust that it will still be there when they return. Clear rewards and reliable state matter as much as the scene itself.

I also learned to design around a tension: the island should be worth caring about, while leaving the app should feel good. Success is someone closing NoMo and getting on with their life.

What's next

I want to grow the island into a connected world that people can keep expanding and shaping: new landscapes, more homes to customise, and neighbours with more personality and things to do together.

Over time, two people's worlds should look different because of the choices they have made. I love the idea of someone looking around months later, remembering their first little house, and realising that everything around it came from time they made for themselves.