ScreenOff - Screen Time Competitions, Challenges, Blockers

Home Screen - Screen time burns your candle. See your challenges.
Screen-Off with your friends - Who really uses their phone less?
App Blockers - Block pesky apps when you're most likely to be sucked in.
Weekly Challenges - Learn what works best for you.
Free vs Pro - See how your friends are doing today with Pro
Select what to track - with full privacy
Lock Screen Widgets - Screen time nudges without opening your phone
Logo

Inspiration

It started quite simple. My husband always said I used my phone more than him. And I was convinced: NO WAY! So I built an app that proves me right.

What it does

ScreenOff turns screen time into a competition. Compare your screen time amongst friends (ScreenOffs) - to help reduce phone usage together.

The person with the tallest candle at the end of the day wins. The person who wins the most days, wins the week. You lost? Try again next week - and this time perhaps with ScreenOff's custom app blockers and weekly challenges.

Personal challenges guide you to use your phone less with little tips that introduce friction to your phone use, from setting app limits to changing your phone to greyscale to morning curfew.

Custom App Blockers help you limit your phone use over time. Set a custom curfew, daily limits or all day blockers for certain apps to remind you you didn't want to open these apps in the first place.

Monetisation: The free version includes up to 3 Screen-Offs and 1 active App Blocker. With Pro, users can further unlock today's screen time data of their ScreenOff friends. Without it, they don't know how others perform today.

How I built it

ScreenOff is built natively for iOS.

Challenges I ran into

Time was my biggest constraint. Having two young kids, getting the time and focus to code can be hard.

The biggest code-related challenge is that you can't access (only display) the user's exact screen time data to upload to a database and compare. I worked around this with events and estimates, which retain privacy but still allow the competition elements. I appreciate Apple's privacy considerations here.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am a huge fan of animations and UI so I am very proud of the candle design. The the glowing embers in the background, how the whole scene adapts to your phone use. The more the candle burns, the darker the screen becomes.

Also, I have personally managed to cut my screen time massively using this app (from 3:30 to 1:10 on avg) and so has my husband <3 So goal achieved?