UBlock

As our lives become increasingly digitized, excessive screen time is becoming common: during July 2021 through December 2023, one-half of teenagers ages 12–17 had 4 hours or more of daily screen time.¹ Excessive use has been associated with negative mental outcomes including depressive symptoms² and disrupted sleep,³ and the problem is only progressing as devices become more accessible and are used by younger demographics.

A variety of social groups have taken this problem as a call to action. Governments have sued social media companies over predatory design practices. Such companies have launched features intended to promote mindful device usage. All claim that they value the wellbeing of users — but the tools and techniques they’ve employed have been faulted as ineffective.

Many of these features are ineffective by design. The screens displayed by various providers often have buttons that allow users to bypass the limit. TikTok found that their daily limit feature only resulted in a 1.3% decrease in time spent on the app, and internal communications reveal that the company purposely directed its employees to avoid reducing the amount of time users spend using the service.⁴

Meta’s “Take a Break” reminders proved equally ineffective, with users choosing to continue using Instagram 40 times more often than actually choosing to take a break.⁵

Apple communicates care about user wellbeing by allowing users to monitor screen time — but parents struggle operating these tools. In February 2022, a user posted a thread on Apple’s Community page, and 2,132 users clicked its “Me too” button to say they share the problem:⁶

The fact that features designed to promote user wellbeing have remained broken for years undermines the idea that Apple cares for user wellbeing at all.

TikTok and Meta are purposefully supplying ineffective tools. Apple is not fixing their own broken instruments. If legal action does not ban social media, better tools must be supplied to the public — either by said companies or by third parties.

A classmate and I interviewed 34 people — mostly college students, plus some working adults — using a fixed set of questions: how much time they spend on their phones, how they’ve tried reducing it, where they physically are when doom-scrolling, and what they’d rather be doing instead. Over 95% want to decrease their screen time. Only 2 had installed a competitor’s application — and both uninstalled it due to the app being ineffective at reducing screen time.

Four patterns stood out:

1. Bypassing becomes a habit. A diligent and committed user can get past the lock screen by getting creative or by simply waiting down the time limit:

2. Blocking leaves a void. Multiple users simply didn’t know what to do with their free time once they were off social media:

3. Customers described the solution themselves. In asking open-ended questions, customers tended to describe the basic functionality of the application we planned to build back to us:

4. Reducing screen time is social. When asked how they would reduce a friend’s screen time, interviewees kept describing social fixes — holding each other accountable, or making it “a challenge amongst your friends”:

The interviews resulted in the software’s requirements, with the two major ones being:

• needs to limit access to distracting applications in a way that is not easily bypassed
• redirects users to productive alternatives from distracting applications instead of simply blocking said distractions

Competitive analysis: seven apps, one shared gap

I analyzed seven competing products — Opal, one sec, Refocus, ScreenZen, Clearspace, Steppin, and BRICK — and, with my research partner, read 100 App Store reviews across five of them.

Opal simply blocks distracting applications during a predefined schedule — it does not take into account personal goals that a user has. one sec is a standout, using the iPhone Shortcuts app to redirect users from distracting apps to one sec and forcing them to take a breather — but it does not give users any meaningful information to base their reflections off of. Steppin blocks distracting apps until the user reaches a specific step count, steering users away from bad habits and towards a beneficial one — but it is very limited in scope. I want to provide a more generic solution that pushes people to do what’s important to them (which might not be running).

The reviews told a consistent story. Opal customers (41k ratings, 4.8★) really enjoy the easy-to-use interface, quick setup, scheduled app limits, and the difficulty of getting out of block screens — and dislike the $100/year price tag, the information-gathering practices, and bugs around picking which apps to block. one sec customers enjoy its customizability and relatively cheap price tag, but dislike the long and tedious setup process that requires visiting other first-party Apple apps. Refocus is very similar to Opal: customers really enjoy the app’s functionality and ease of use, but are not fans of the hefty price tag associated with additional features.

The competition paywalls basic features that we could provide for free. Most of the competitors in the market offer very similar solutions — block specific apps during specific hours. However, they do not redirect users towards positive or productive activities, and this is where my market opportunity lies. Not just blocking — redirecting.

Sketching the UI

Using the customer interviews and software requirements as a guide, I created drafts of the software’s UI to further guide the physical implementation.

Every smartphone user interacts with their distracting applications in different ways, and also has different definitions of what truly is too much time spent on screens. The home screen draft makes everything user-defined: which apps count as distracting, which goals to pursue instead, and when the blocking schedule runs.

The social pattern from the interviews became the leaderboard: a feature that encourages users to compare their screen times with friends. It would only function when a user had friends that also used the application, in theory encouraging the overall user base to grow. A profile screen supports it — users would be able to customize profiles, add friends, and view their friends’ screen times.

Designing the App Shield

UBlock’s most important screen is the one that appears when a user opens a blocked app. I designed the App Shield to show users their own goals:

Building UBlock

Apple represents 57.93% of the U.S. mobile vendor market share,⁷ so building for iOS put the app in front of a majority of the smartphone market — Xcode, Swift and SwiftUI. UBlock is actually three programs — the app plus two extensions — that share state through an App Group:

The selection functionality is provided by the Family Activity Picker, a predefined view provided by the Family Controls framework. The picker returns opaque tokens rather than actual app identities, so UBlock never knows which apps were selected — it can only display the selection back to the user and hand it to the shield.

Where Apple drew the line — twice

Although a larger technical tool was initially planned, technical hurdles and software capabilities led to a shift in scope for the project, resulting in a focus on the features that truly define how users interact with the proposed application.

Currently, once a user opens a blocked app and views the “Narrow Your Focus” App Shield, they must close the app and reopen UBlock in order to view their list of productive alternatives. one sec’s use of Apple’s Shortcut Automations — opening itself immediately when a distracting app like Instagram or TikTok is opened — proves that true redirection is possible; the next step is seeing if there is a way to set those automations up programmatically, so users have to do less upon installation.

The resulting application is a minimum viable product that allows users to select apps they consider distracting, create a list of productive alternatives they’d rather commit their time to, and set a schedule during which the distracting apps are blocked via the Screen Time API’s App Shield. The app’s functionality is centered around one main screen, where the user can view their personal configurations and choose whether or not to edit them. The screen is divided into three sections: “Distracting Apps”, “Productive Alternatives”, and “Schedule”. Once saved, the schedule enforces itself in the background, whether or not UBlock is ever opened again. By the end of the semester, 34 people were willing to beta-test it.

Ultimately, this capstone project serves as an important step towards a much larger and more sophisticated tool. However, it still offers promising functionality in its minimum viable product state, and can already be used by others to help them reduce their screen time on distracting apps.

Thirty-four conversations validated our hypothesis before anything was built. The strongest moment in research was hearing customers describe the basic functionality of the application we planned to build back to us, unprompted.

Software development is inherently hard to schedule and manage. Features that may seem simple and quick to implement can prove challenging, with unforeseen bugs and implementation hurdles — while seemingly complex features can end up being heavily supported by existing libraries or APIs and take less than an hour to integrate.

A tool for less screen time shouldn’t want your attention. UBlock is designed to be configured once and then disappear into the operating system. Its success metric is your absence.

What’s next

• Polish the interface until it communicates the same level of quality as competing apps.
• See if there’s a way to set up iOS Shortcut redirects programmatically, so that installation stays effortless and opening a blocked app lands you directly in UBlock.
• Explore emergency bypasses for the niche situations where getting past the block really matters.
• Let users type the task they’re leaving to do, and keep it pinned in the Dynamic Island during a bypass.
• Revisit the leaderboard and social features to see whether they can be implemented.
• Launch the beta and learn from real users.