OAZUKE: Put your phone down, get a treat

Oazuke turns focus time into treats. Put your phone down, stay focused, and earn a random treat. The more you focus, the more your jar fills—making time away from your phone fun and rewarding.

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Inspiration

I often find myself picking up my phone without really thinking about it. I open one app for a few minutes, and before I know it, much more time has passed.

There are already many focus apps that block apps or measure how long you stay focused. But I wanted to make something that would make me actually want to put my phone down.

That is how OAZUKE started.

“Oazuke” (おあずけ) is a Japanese word for having to wait before you get something you want — a treat saved for later. I thought that idea matched the experience perfectly: while you stay away from your phone, a treat is waiting for you inside the refrigerator.

Instead of focusing because you have to, I wanted people to think, “I wonder what treat I'll get this time.”

What it does

OAZUKE is a focus app where putting your phone down earns you virtual treats. The basic flow is simple:

Choose what you want to do → set a time → start focusing → get a treat.

When a session starts, a mystery treat goes into a retro refrigerator. If you stay focused until the end, the refrigerator opens and you finally find out what you got.

If you leave the app during the session, cold air escapes from the refrigerator. Leave for too long, and your treat may end up in a less-than-perfect state. This was never meant to feel like a normal “You failed” screen. Even when things don't go perfectly, the result is designed to be cute and a little funny.

As you keep using OAZUKE, your effort starts to build up visually:

  • Collect up to 30 different treats
  • Fill a jar with the treats you earned that month
  • Longer focus sessions create larger treats in the jar
  • Look back at your focus time with a calendar and activity records
  • Track your current and longest streaks
  • Watch this week's streak freeze into ice cubes in the fridge's freezer
  • Decorate your refrigerator with 59 stickers
  • Create Polaroid-style stickers using your own photos
  • Customize the refrigerator with 10 color themes
  • Lock every app except up to three you choose while you focus (Premium)
  • Add friends to see their progress and visit their refrigerators
  • See your progress from a Home Screen widget
  • Keep track of an active session with Live Activities
  • Use the app in 5 languages

The time you spend away from your phone should become something you can actually see. The fuller your jar gets, the more it feels like a record of what you accomplished.

How I built it

I built OAZUKE by myself for iOS using SwiftUI and SwiftData. From the beginning, I didn't want it to look like a typical productivity app filled with numbers and charts. Opening the app should feel more like opening a small game, which is why the refrigerator became the center of the experience.

I designed the refrigerator in Figma and built a pipeline using Python and Lottie to bring it into the app as vector-based animation. Things like opening the refrigerator door and its movement are animated, and the colors can be changed at runtime so users can customize their refrigerator without needing a completely separate set of artwork for every theme. This approach also made it easier for me to keep adding customization as the app grew.

I also wanted the refrigerator to feel physical. When a session starts, the treat lands inside with a light tap, and the door shuts with a heavier thud, timed to the exact moment it hits the fridge. If you come back after leaving, a soft pulse tells you some of the cold got out.

For monetization, I use RevenueCat to manage OAZUKE Premium, with monthly, yearly, and one-time purchase options. The core experience is available for free, while Premium unlocks more treats, stickers, colors, and additional focus features.

For the paywall, I didn't want to lead with a feature list. It opens with illustrated cards that show what becomes possible with Premium, followed by a short comparison with the free version. Premium should feel like more ways to enjoy OAZUKE, not something you need before the app becomes useful.

Challenges I ran into

One of the hardest parts was detecting when someone had actually left a focus session. Turning off the screen should be okay. In fact, that is exactly what I want people to do. But opening another app during a session is different.

To the app, those two can look almost the same. iOS doesn't simply tell an app whether the screen is locked, and on some devices the signal it does give arrives late or not at all. This became much more complicated than I expected, and it made me think carefully about how strict OAZUKE should be. I didn't want users to lose a session because the app guessed incorrectly about something it couldn't reliably detect.

So I set myself one rule: never punish what you can't detect.

Everything around leaving and returning is built on that rule, while still keeping the focus mechanic meaningful.

Some of the most useful cases only appeared after I released the app. Users contacted me when a session behaved unexpectedly on their device, and those reports showed me situations I had never encountered while testing it myself. I would investigate them, fix what I could, release an update, and then learn from the next round of feedback. That process has become a big part of developing OAZUKE.

Another challenge was making failure fit the personality of the app. A harsh error screen felt completely wrong for something built around cute treats and a retro refrigerator. So instead of making failure feel like punishment, I tried to make it part of the fun.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm most proud that OAZUKE has grown into more than the focus timer I originally imagined.

A focus session gives you a treat.

Those treats fill your collection.

Your monthly effort fills a jar.

Your refrigerator gradually becomes your own through colors, stickers, and photos.

All of those features come back to the same simple action: putting your phone down for a while.

I'm also proud that I was able to build and release the whole experience as a solo developer. The timer, collection system, refrigerator animations, jar, customization, widgets, Live Activities, statistics, localization, and monetization all started as small ideas and gradually became one app.

So far, people have finished over 60,000 sessions and spent nearly 50,000 hours away from their phones with OAZUKE.

But the part I'm happiest about is hearing from users that OAZUKE actually helps them study, finish homework, work, or simply spend less time looking at their phones. That made the project feel much more real than any number on a dashboard.

What I learned

The biggest thing I learned is that making something useful isn't enough. It also has to be something people want to come back to.

At first, I thought mainly about helping people stay away from their phones. After releasing OAZUKE, I started thinking much more about what makes someone want to do another focus session tomorrow. For OAZUKE, small things made a big difference: not knowing which treat will appear, seeing the jar slowly fill up, decorating the refrigerator, and making even an unsuccessful session feel a little playful.

I also learned how different building an app is once real people start using it. Users found bugs I couldn't reproduce, used features in ways I hadn't expected, and sent ideas that changed what I built next. OAZUKE is much better now than the version I originally planned because of that feedback.

I also learned something about asking people to pay. A paywall that popped up after every session barely sold anything. Once I let people find Premium on their own, when they reached for a locked sticker or the app lock, purchases per active user tripled.

What's next for OAZUKE

I want to keep making the collection side of OAZUKE more fun, while keeping the focus experience simple. I want to add more things to discover, more ways to make the refrigerator feel personal, and better ways to look back at the time you've spent focusing.

I'm also interested in ways people could focus together, so putting your phone down doesn't always have to be something you do alone.

My goal hasn't really changed since I started:

I want putting your phone down to feel a little more fun.

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