We built a phone blocker, then made unlocking it slow
GRDN is ours. It blocks apps for real, and the feature people write to us about is the one that makes getting them back a small ritual.
Disclosure first. GRDN is an app I make. It has been on the App Store since December, it is small, and this piece is about a design decision inside it rather than a reason to download it.
The premise is simple. Focus apps that ask nicely do not work, because the apps they are competing with were built by teams whose whole job is to beat your willpower.
So GRDN uses Apple’s Screen Time framework to block chosen apps for real during a focus session. Not a nudge. The icon greys out and the app will not open.
That part is table stakes now. Several blockers do it. The decision worth writing about is what happens when you want out.
Binary locks fail
Most blockers are a switch. Locked or unlocked. The trouble with a switch is that the same finger that started the session can end it, and at minute twenty-three of a hard task that finger is very persuasive.
Make the switch impossible to flip and people stop using the app, because life happens and sometimes you need the thing you blocked. Make it easy and the block is theatre.
The pause
GRDN’s answer is called Gate Pause. To get a temporary unblock you wait through a countdown, then write one line of gratitude, and then you get a ten-minute window. After that the block returns on its own.
Three things are doing work there. The countdown makes the decision cost time, which is the one currency the impulse does not have.
The gratitude line makes you do something slightly incongruous with doomscrolling, and most people find they have lost the urge by the second word. And the window is short and closes by itself, so nobody has to decide to go back.
It is not a lock. It is a door that is slow to open and quick to close. Structure, in the tagline we ended up with, will take you where willpower cannot.
What we got wrong
Two things, in the interest of the disclosure being worth something.
Until May the app showed a full-screen subscription page at random on about a fifth of cold starts, with no back button.
That is a dark pattern, it was in our changelog as such, and it was removed in the same release that added labels to the navigation and a way to say “maybe later”. It should never have shipped.
And in June a home-screen redesign accidentally removed every route to the blocker’s settings, which is the one thing the app exists to do.
The fix went out the next day. I mention it because “we test everything” is the kind of sentence that reassures the writer and nobody else.
What it cannot do
It only blocks on iPhone, and only on recent versions of iOS, because the blocking depends on Apple’s family-controls entitlements. It cannot block a website in a browser you have not told it about.
It cannot make you want to work. It can make the first thirty seconds of not working slightly more effort than the first thirty seconds of working, and it turns out that is often the whole margin.
If you have used a blocker and quit it, the reason was probably the switch. Try one with a door.