I get the idea but it does not work for me. I need to uninstall it. That’s what I did for Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

While defeating such a restriction is usually trivial, the point isn’t so much to stop you from using the app, as much as it is to make you aware of just how much time you’re spending on it. Sometimes being made aware of how much time you’re dedicating to a habit can help you in breaking it.

I know somebody who used a similar mechanism to quit smoking. He’d tally up each cigarette he’d have throughout the day, and having a number to reference helped to quantify the problem for him. Counting his smokes wasn’t what made him quit, but it helped him realize just how severe his problem was, so he was able to actually find the motivation to do something about it. Similarly, an app timer may trigger the thought of “I keep spending more time on this app than I promised myself I would, I need to figure out what keeps drawing me to do this”.

This might help someone, I recently found an Android app called ‘DigiPaws’ that is designed to block selected apps during ‘quiet time’ or ‘focus periods’ that you set up - so the use-case of the topic.

I know “an app to quit an app” but I’ve found it actually really helpful to stop me from touching social media when I’m supposed to be winding down to go to bed - I click on Lemmy/Greyjay and it literally closes the app and popup/toasts ‘quiet time [period remaining]’ and I’m like, “oh yeah shit I should just go to bed”.

I have a bachelor’s degree but when it comes to the dopamine loop of social media scrolling I’m dumb as hell, and just having this little app effectively slap the phone away from my hand has been great in the month I’ve used it (its fairly new).

Its on F-droid store as its open source, code on github. I know that’s a big plus to most here.

“It’s like putting a serving of chips into a bowl rather than eating straight from the bag!” She muffled over bites and crinkling wrappers.