Nuro: Scroll War

Stop brainrotting on your phone. Nuro locks your social apps until you beat a quick brain game. Win to earn time in them. Scroll less, grow your focus and memory instead, and watch Nuro grow with you.

Comment

Inspiration

I used to be a heavy user of Screen Time apps, and I always ended up doing one of two things: deleting the blocker, or tapping "5 more minutes" until the limit meant nothing. Blocking apps relies on willpower, and willpower loses to a feed built to keep me scrolling.

At the same time I kept noticing a whole category of brain-game and mental-maths apps that people download, use for a week and forget. So I asked myself:

What if screen time were a currency, and the way you earn it was to train your brain?

That question became Nuro: Scroll War. People are brainrotting, so instead of just blocking the apps I gave the urge to scroll somewhere better to go. You play a quick brain game, win coins, and spend those coins on timed access to the apps you blocked. A companion, Nuro, is on your side and grows with you.

The quick hit of dopamine that scrolling gives you doesn't disappear. It gets redirected into something that improves your memory, focus and overall cognitive skills, while you spend less time brainrotting. That's the whole idea.

What it does

  • Block the apps that pull you in. You choose them with Apple's Screen Time picker. The selection stays on your device.
  • Play to earn. Nine 90-second brain games train memory, focus and speed: Memory Matrix, Stroop Tap, Math Sprint, N-Back, Sequence Echo, Odd One Out, Reaction Rush, Word Scramble and Quick Count. Every win earns coins.
  • Spend coins on timed breaks. Coins buy a set number of minutes in your blocked apps. When the timer ends, the block returns.
  • A daily limit by design. Rewarded play is capped at around 10 to 15 games a day. That takes roughly 20 minutes, and it can earn up to about 90 to 120 minutes of social-app time. For many people that is less than they scroll today, and it comes with a workout for the brain.
  • Nuro grows with you. Your companion reacts to your play, levels up, and unlocks outfits and a little world as your streak grows.
  • Leaderboards and duels. Weekly leagues and duels, where players compete on the same puzzle, keep the dopamine on the game side instead of the feed. Coin-staked duels are the next thing I'm building.

Meet Nuro

Nuro lives on your Home screen, in a little world that changes with your day. Tap Nuro and it reacts: it looks up from its book, hops, and talks back ("Psst... still time for today's brain break."). It celebrates your wins, reads quietly while you're on a break, and wears the outfits you earn. Having a small friend waiting for you is what turns a daily brain break into a habit instead of a chore.

How I built it

  • Flutter (Dart) for the app: the nine game engines, the animated Nuro companion and every screen.
  • Native iOS (Swift) for protection. The Screen Time API, with a shield extension and an activity-monitor extension, does the actual blocking. Flutter cannot do this on its own.
  • Supabase (Postgres, RPCs and Edge Functions) for accounts, coins and rewards.
  • Server-authoritative rewards. A game's score is never trusted from the phone. The app sends the input trace, and the server replays the game with the same engine to work out the score and pay out coins. It's much harder to cheat, and the coin balance stays honest.
  • Offline play. Solo games work without a network, using a local SQLite store. Rewards are confirmed by the server once the phone is back online.
  • RevenueCat for everything to do with money (see below).
  • PostHog for product analytics.

Monetization with RevenueCat

Nuro Pro is a yearly subscription at US$39/year with a 3-day free trial for eligible new users, offered on a custom paywall after a playable tutorial.

Challenges

  • Making Screen Time work with Flutter. The blocking lives in native extensions with their own limits, and it has to keep working when the app is closed or offline.
  • Making rewards cheat-proof without needing a connection. I needed the server to be the authority for coins while still letting people play offline, which meant designing prepared rounds and later reconciliation.
  • Designing protection that doesn't punish. Removing a protected app triggers a 48-hour wait, so an impulsive moment can't undo your choice, while adding apps stays free.
  • Getting through App Review. A Screen Time app with a subscription needs very clear privacy answers and paywall wording, so I iterated on both with Apple.

What I learned

  • Blocking alone doesn't change habits. Offering a better thing to do at the moment of the urge does.
  • A companion people care about makes short daily sessions feel like a relationship, not a chore.

Launch status

Nuro went live on the App Store on 29 September 2026. The full loop (lock, play, earn, spend, relock), the paywall and the RevenueCat entitlement flow are live and instrumented with PostHog and RevenueCat.

What's next

  • Coin-staked duels between friends.
  • More games and a deeper world for Nuro.
  • Android support.
  • Organic short-form video (TikTok and Reels) built around the "blocked app, brain game, earned break" moment.
  • Paywall and trial experiments driven by real conversion data.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history