Screen time, actually enforced
Enforcing focus with an API that is not allowed to watch you
Lookupp - focus and screen time app
Built on Apple's Screen Time API to lock distracting apps and pay users back in points for staying focused. Getting that framework to behave reliably was most of the work.
Built with
- iOS
- Firebase
- Supabase
The problem
Apple's Screen Time API - FamilyControls, ManagedSettings and DeviceActivity - is deliberately locked down. An app can shield other apps without ever being told which apps they are, because Apple designed the framework so that what someone does on their phone never leaves the device.
That privacy guarantee is the whole engineering problem. Lookupp rewards people with points for staying focused, which means it has to be sure a focus session really happened - while being structurally forbidden from looking at what the user was doing. The proof has to come from a framework that answers in opaque tokens and runs its monitoring in extensions outside the app.
It is also a framework with sharp edges: authorization that can lapse, schedules that have to survive a reboot, and shields that must lift the instant a session ends rather than a minute later. Reliability here is not polish - an app that wrongly locks someone out of their phone gets deleted the same day.
What it does
App shielding that holds
Distracting apps are locked for the length of a focus session using the Screen Time API, not a workaround that a determined user routes around in seconds.
Points for staying focused
Completed sessions pay the user back in points - a reward loop built on top of a framework that reveals nothing about what was blocked.
Firebase and Supabase behind it
The account, session and rewards data that the on-device framework cannot hold live in a backend of their own.
“Chirag has been fantastic to work with! He's extremely responsive, communicates clearly, works incredibly fast, and consistently delivers high-quality work at a very reasonable price. We've worked with him extensively on a major overhaul of our app's backend logic, numerous new features, UI refinements, bug fixes, and much more.”
Have something similar in mind?
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