Ritsu — AI Zen Monk Habits

What it is Ritsu is a habit-building app for people who lose their mornings and nights to social media. Kuu, a small AI zen monk who lives by a pond, helps you design days that aren't swept away by your phone.

It is not just an app blocker. Ritsu builds a behavior-change loop into the day: put the phone down → journal or breathe → Kuu writes back → reflect.

How it works

Morning and night quiet hours: Apple Screen Time (FamilyControls / ManagedSettings / DeviceActivity) closes the apps you choose on a schedule you set, with custom weekdays. During those hours only Ritsu and your allowed apps open.
Focus Timer: pick a length, and your distracting apps stay shielded until it ends. A lotus bud in the pond unfurls as minutes pass and blooms when the session completes.
Journaling with an AI reply: write what's on your mind. Kuu reads it and answers in three beats — empathy, a quiet sorting of your thoughts, and one small next step.
Breathing and meditation (1–5 minutes) as the "off ramp" when you want to open a blocked app.
Custom shield screens: the block screen changes by time of day (morning gold, focus green, night deep green) and offers "start a meditation" or "back to focus" instead of a dead end.
5-question check-in that maps you to a type and proposes a plan.
Reflection view of the hours you won back.

Monetization (RevenueCat)

Ritsu Pro subscription via RevenueCat: Monthly $4.99 and Yearly $34.99, both with a 3-day free trial.
Pro unlocks scheduled morning/night blocking, unlimited focus sessions, and journaling with Kuu's AI replies.
Free tier: limited focus sessions, supported by AdMob banners and an interstitial after a session (ads hidden for trial and Pro users).
RevenueCat webhooks sync subscription state to Firestore so each user's status (trial, active, sandbox) is visible in an internal dashboard.
Apple Search Ads attribution is passed through RevenueCat's AdServices integration.

How we built it

SwiftUI, StoreKit 2 via the RevenueCat SDK, Apple Screen Time API with four extensions (monitor, shield configuration, shield action, report).
Firebase Cloud Functions (asia-northeast1) proxy the AI reply (OpenAI GPT-5.1 with a three-part zen prompt) and log events, so the app ships with no analytics SDK.
Kuu's illustrations and the pond/lotus scenes are original assets; the app supports iPhone and iPad.

Shipping story (the hard part) Ritsu was first submitted on Aug 20 and rejected under guideline 4.3(a) "design spam" three times. A phone call with App Review revealed it was a code-level similarity flag, not UX. We stripped every third-party SDK, shipped v1.0 on Sep 14 with a pure-Apple binary, then re-introduced RevenueCat in v1.0.1 (Sep 16) after approval — it passed on the first try. v1.1 (Sep 18) added ads and richer analytics; v1.2 (Sep 19) shipped the redesigned shield screens and Apple Search Ads attribution. Four releases in six days after a month of rejections.

Post-launch metrics (Sep 14 – Sep 30)

4 App Store releases (v1.0 → v1.2) in the first week
~36 organic/ASA installs with events, 0 paid marketing spend before Sep 25
Onboarding: 94% start the check-in, 63% reach their diagnosis result, 54% reach the paywall, 37% complete setup (Screen Time + notification permission)
26% start a focus session; first Apple Search Ads campaign live since late September
Learned: the biggest drop is after the first home screen — next iteration targets the first focus session and a day-2 return

What's next

Weekly report (already built, gated behind a feature flag)
"Emergency unlock" consumable via RevenueCat: pay a small fee you set yourself to break your own promise for a few minutes
Tuning the free/paid split from RevenueCat trial and conversion data

Note for judges The app is available in English and Japanese; the demo video and screenshots show the English UI. Both Ritsu Pro plans (Monthly $4.99, Yearly $34.99) start with a 3-day free trial, so judges can test every premium feature without a promo code. Open the app → finish the 2-minute check-in → tap "Start free trial" on the paywall.