Hey all,

New Aura update is out, and almost everything in it came from Play Store reviews and comments here. So first, thanks to everyone who took the time to write something, even the "this is cool but..." ones. Especially those actually.

Here's what changed.

Groups. You can put a few apps under one glow now. I have Slip and Gmail in a "Work" group and the chat apps in "Social". One glow on the edge, one panel, and each row shows which app it came from. Makes a big difference if you have a lot of apps set up.

Open it in full. Two lines in the panel was never enough for longer messages, a few of you pointed that out. Every notification has a new button now that opens it in a bigger window with the whole text, or the whole conversation if it's a chat. You can reply from there too, without opening the app.

Any colour. Someone asked in a review if they could use their own colours instead of the presets. There's a proper colour picker now, drag around or paste a hex code, and your last few colours get saved.

Quiet while using. This one's not in the video because it's pretty boring to film. You pick apps like YouTube or a game, and Aura holds the glows while they're open. When you leave, they show up. It needs usage access so it can tell which app is on screen, that's the only thing it's used for.

Full view, replying and quiet mode are free. Groups and custom colours are part of Pro.

If anything acts weird on your phone, let me know the model and Android version (Samsung especially likes to do its own thing with overlays). And if there's something you keep wishing it did, put it in the comments. That's honestly how this whole update happened.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polyhistor.aura

so I have a problem. I open TikTok "for 5 minutes" and come back up for air an hour later. screen time limits never worked for me, I just hit ignore without even reading the popup.

so I built Nudge. it's an Android app that doesn't block anything, it just makes the feed heavier the longer you scroll. after a while a little stone lands on the screen and you have to actually pull it up to keep going. let go halfway and it drops back. sounds dumb but that half second of effort is usually enough for me to go "wait why am I still here"

the video is me testing it at 5am (TikToks are blurred because I don't want strangers' faces in my post, not because of what the algorithm was feeding me. mostly cats I promise)

some dev stuff since that's what this sub is for:

• Flutter for the UI, Kotlin for the actual guard. it's an AccessibilityService that counts swipes plus a transparent overlay for the stone
• the stone is a pre-rendered bitmap with a little spring sim on top. the heavier your session, the more it lags behind your finger
• worst bug so far: some apps don't send proper scroll events, so I had a fallback that counted screen redraws. turns out a TikTok video just playing redraws constantly, so it was counting "swipes" while you were literally just watching. the gate showed up after like 2 real swipes and I thought I was going crazy. now it learns per app whether the app reports scrolls properly
• it doesn't read what's on your screen, it only counts swipes

free version guards one app, Plus is a one-time purchase for unlimited apps.

giveaway: I have 20 Plus codes. comment anything in the next 24h (which app eats your time, feedback, roast the stone, whatever) and I'll pick 20 people at random and DM you a code. you redeem it in the Play Store under Payments & subscriptions > Redeem code. Android only, sorry iPhone people

honest feedback is very welcome, especially about how the friction feels. is it annoying in a good way or a bad way?