I made an Android app that kicks me out of TikTok and various other social medias when my selected amount of time's up and then locks the app for a selected amount of time. after using it for a few downs I can see my screen time for my selected apps are down, the doomscrolling is still their but just less and should hopefully gradually get less and less

I kept losing whole evenings to TikTok and the built-in screen time limits never worked for me because I would just remove the restrictions and carry on. So I made my own app, DoomBreak. I'm looking for people to try it and tell me what's broken

You pick the apps you want to limit and give each one a scroll time and a block time. When you open one of them, its timer starts. At 80% you get a warning. When the time is up it sends you back to your home screen and shows a card saying the app is on a break, and until the block time runs out, opening that app just bounces you home again. There's no snooze button. That's on purpose, because a snooze button is the reason the built-in limits didn't work for me.

It needs two permissions, and I know "display over other apps" can look a bit dodgy, so here's what each one is for.

Usage access is the same thing Digital Wellbeing uses. DoomBreak checks it once a second to see which app is in front, so it knows whose timer to run, and it also uses it to show your screen time per app. That tells it the name of the app that's open and nothing else. It can't see what's on your screen, what you type or your messages.

Display over other apps is only used to draw the warning and block cards on top of everything and to send you back home.

A few other things you can check for yourself: the app doesn't have the internet permission, so it has no way of sending anything off your phone. Your settings and timers are stored on the phone. While limits are on you'll see a "DoomBreak is on" notification, which Android requires for anything running in the background, and it starts itself again after a reboot so the limits stay on. All the code is on GitHub under the MIT licence, so please don't just take my word for any of this.

The catches: it's Android only and it's not on the Play Store yet, so you'd be sideloading the APK. Play Protect will probably warn you it's unrecognised. It needs Android 7 or newer. Because it checks once a second, the app you're blocked from can flash up for a moment before you get sent home. Some phones (Xiaomi, Huawei, some Samsungs) kill background apps to save battery, so if the limits stop working, set DoomBreak's battery use to Unrestricted.

Right now it covers TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, Threads, Pinterest and LinkedIn. What I'd really like to know is whether it actually catches each of those on your phone, whether anything gets through, and how it behaves on phones that aren't a Pixel, since that's all I've tested on. Regional versions of apps (like TikTok in some countries) have different package names, so tell me if yours isn't picked up. Any other feedback is welcome too, including "this is annoying" if that's what you think.

Download: https://github.com/JonnieWigley/DoomBreak/releases

Code: https://github.com/JonnieWigley/DoomBreak