Scrappy
SCREEN TIME · iOS 18+

Get back control
of your life.

He guards the apps you asked him to guard. He gets less patient every time you knock. He is still there at 1am, when your willpower is not.

No account, everNothing leaves your phone36 languagesTreats can't be boughtEvery safety rail is free
THE PREMISE

Every blocker
loses the same
way.

The friction they put up is identical every single time, so you habituate to it in about four days and start swiping through without reading. Scrappy's answer isn't more friction. It's a character who remembers.

The whole product rests on one substitution. Where other blockers show a system dialog, Scrappy shows a small scruffy dog who has been standing at that door since you asked him to. Swiping away a reminder is easy. Getting past a dog who is visibly disappointed in you is not.

That isn't a mascot bolted onto a settings screen. It runs all the way down, the escalation ladder, the notification budget, the emergency valve, the refusal to ever sell you a way past him. He is the product.

“I have chewed your shoe.
We are both disappointed.”
The tenth attempt to openInstagramTikTokFacebookYouTubeXRedditInstagram
STANDING AT THE DOOR

He gets less patient.

Face, words and the temperature of the whole field move with how many times you have knocked. Every tap is written to shared storage, so the next render reads the count back and escalates. Nothing repeats within a session.

TIKTOK
Ah. TikTok.
You told me evenings were the problem. It is 9:41 pm.
Throw him a treatNot now
1st try2nd3rd4th7th10thAny try, 2am
Watch him escalate
Alert
The first knock is information, not a telling-off. He states the rule and the time, and leaves it there.
A clean streak buys a softer knock. Good all week and the first attempt is gentle: “You have been good all week. Do you want to spend that here?”
Late night overrides everything. Between midnight and 5am, from the second attempt on, he drops the ladder and just tells you what time it is.
It's a still frame, by law. The shield can't animate or play sound, so every face is a pre-sized image inside the extension's own bundle. What makes it feel alive is memory, not motion.
FOUR SURFACES

Apps aren't enough.

Apps and categories alone were the obvious build, and quietly broken: someone blocked out of Instagram opened Safari, typed six letters and was through. The product had taught them the way around itself.

Apps
Named, one by one, no cap on how many.
App categories
All of social, all of games, in one go.
Web domains
The six letters you'd have typed in Safari.
Web categories
The whole shape of it, not a list you maintain.
THREE RULES, NO FOURTH

Between them they
cover every real case.

Rules apply to everything he guards or to named apps only, which is how you get evenings off TikTok, a ceiling on YouTube, and Sunday off for all of it.

Quiet hours
He guards the door between two times. Any days of the week, wrapping over midnight, which “quiet hours” almost always does.
Daily limit
You get so many minutes a day. Once they're spent the door stays shut for the rest of the day, whatever the schedules say.
Open limit
You get so many openings a day. Six looks is plenty, and counting them catches the reach a minute limit never sees.
The shelf
Fifteen ready-made rules. Time-to-first-rule is where this category loses people.
Pick one, or write your own
After midnight12am–6am, nightlyThe first hour6am–9am, dailyThe morning shift9am–12pm, weekdaysThe long afternoon1pm–5pm, weekdaysWorking hours9am–5pm, weekdaysDinner6pm–8pm, dailySeven to eleven7pm–11pm, nightlyWeekend mornings8am–1pm, Sat & SunSunday offAll day SundayOne hour60 min a dayNinety minutes90 min a dayTwo hours120 min a dayFour hours240 min a dayFive hours300 min a daySix looks6 opens a day
He quotes you back
Onboarding answers aren't thrown away after colouring two lines of copy. They're ranked into real proposals, and every card quotes the answer it came from.
“You said evenings. So the evening is when I stand up.”
The obvious alternative, a made-up percentage claiming it works for 97% of users like you, would have been the first thing the app ever said that wasn't true.
The ratchet: he learns
People who say five hours are often ninety-minute people, and a rule that never fires makes the app look like it's doing nothing. The competition solves this by guessing your usage and enforcing the guess.
“Your worst day this week was 2h. The ceiling is 5h, and you never got near it.”
Accepting is one tap. Declining buys a quiet week. Nothing ever tightens on its own, and a tightened rule always lands on a number that exists on the shelf.
RESISTANCE

How hard he is
to talk round.

Set per app. This started as a single boolean, which offered exactly two answers, a treat works, or nothing works, and the gap between them is where people actually live. The middle tier is the useful one.

Negotiable
A treat opens it straight away.
Firm
A treat opens it, after you sit still for ten seconds. Long enough to break a reach that was never a decision.
Absolute
No treat opens it. Only the emergency pass.
The ten-second sit is measured between presses rather than counted down, because nothing redraws a shield on a timer. That turned out better than a countdown: pressing again is a second, separate decision, which is the entire point of the tier. Wander off for two minutes and the wait starts over.
TREATS

Earned. Never sold.

A treat is the currency that buys you past the shield. That they can't be purchased is a product rule, not a pricing decision, and the paywall says so on its face: he can be kept, but he can't be bribed. There is no consumable purchase of any kind.

HOW A TREAT IS EARNEDWHAT IT TAKES
Daily allowance3 a day
Went outside~2,000 steps
Finished a walk1 session
Ceiling6 in one day
5 minutes
What one treat buys by default. Adjustable from one to sixty.
The day resets when you get up, not at midnight, because a 2am scroll honestly belongs to yesterday.
WALKS

A focus session that
is actually going out.

Everything he guards stays shut for the length of it, whatever the rule windows say. Finishing one earns a treat. Each has its own scene, its own line while it runs, and its own notification when it ends.

WALKLENGTHWHAT HE SAYS
A walk25 min“Out we go. I'll hold everything.”
The commute30 min“Look out of the window. It's right there.”
Reading45 min“Go on then. I'll keep the noise off.”
Training60 min“Nothing in your pocket is going to help you lift.”
Dinner90 min“Whoever you're with is better company than I am.”
Deep work2 hours“Two hours. I'll be outside the door.”
Touch grass4 hours“Four hours off the thing. Go and be somewhere.”
Sleep on it8 hours“Goodnight. It'll all still be there.”
Kill the app mid-walk and reopening lands you back on the walk screen rather than Home, because someone who force-quit has by definition forgotten it's running, and a Home screen with every app silently locked reads as a broken phone.
HOME, AND THE WEATHER

The sky is not decoration.

Sun height, sky colour, cloud mass, ground temperature, mat tone and his mood are all a step off one number: streak health, which is nights clean minus what today has already cost. No new screens, no new components, the same screen under different weather.

Eight nights cleanThree nights, two knocksBroken, six knocks
SUNDAY
Eight nights clean.
The sun is as high as it gets.
3treats8streak0knocksStart a walk
HIGH SUN
A clean week reads as a bright morning. He is wagging, the mat is warm, and nothing on the screen had to say “well done”.
And you can pet him.
Twelve reactions on a weighted draw. Five common enough to see in the first minute, four in the middle, two rare, and one at 1 in 200 that most people will never get. The weights are literally percentages, and they are the whole design: a reaction that always fires is a button, and a screen full of buttons is not a dog.
tap him
THE PROFILES

He names you.

Keyed off when it's worst, and shown after your first rule rather than before it, a diagnosis lands harder when it explains a choice you just made than when it's trying to sell you one.

The Early Reacher
“The phone is in your hand before your eyes are open.”
The Desk Drifter
“You never stopped working. You just stopped doing the work.”
The Sofa Sinker
“Nothing starts after eight. Not the book, not the evening.”
The Midnight Scroller
“You are not still awake. You are awake again.”
The payoff screen costs the rule out in hours, and it's deliberately built to undersell: only 45% of a day's phone time is assumed to land in the window you named as worst, a window can't hold more than 80% of its own length, and the whole thing is multiplied by an adherence factor of 0.75, because nobody keeps a rule perfectly, and the screen says so out loud. Under about twenty minutes a day recovered, it declines to make a case at all.
SAFETY RAILS

All of them free.

Paywalling the feature that prevents a boarding-pass emergency earns one-star reviews and deserves them.

Never touch
An allow list he walks past even inside a guarded category. Maps, your bank, the airline.
Emergency pass
One a month, fifteen minutes, works on absolute apps. Press and hold, and he doesn't scold.
Removal lock
Optional, ships off, closes the 11pm delete-and-reinstall loophole.
What's he holding?
A live readout of what is actually in his settings store, to the number.
Let everything go
Drops every shield he currently has up, in one action.
Hand back Screen Time
iOS discards every setting the app ever applied. If something is still locked after this, it was never Scrappy holding it.
There is always a way out.
The removal lock is a commitment device, not a trap. “Ask him to let go” starts a 24-hour cooling-off period, after which the lock releases on its own. The wait is the point: it outlasts an urge, and nobody is ever permanently stuck.
No payment, subscription or contact with anyone is required to escape it.
It states plainly, before you commit, that the API is device-wide.
The app only records the lock as on if the system actually took it, so it can never claim a protection it doesn't have.
PRIVACY
No account. No sign-up. Nothing to leak.
Every figure the app shows and every rule it enforces lives on the device. The Screen Time audit is the interesting part: Apple's report extension is the one place a third party may see your real numbers, and it runs in a sandbox with no network and no App Group. It can render your Screen Time and do precisely nothing else, so the audit is shown and never stored.
The one thing that leaves the phone is the purchase: an App Store transaction and an anonymous identifier, purely to answer “is this person subscribed”. Settings shows that id and copies it on tap, so anyone can ask for the record it points at to be erased. HealthKit is read-only, step count only, asked for at the moment it's used.
THIRTY-SIX LANGUAGES
Transcreated, not translated.
Translators get a voice brief rather than a spreadsheet, and it says plainly that a literal translation of this app is a worse product than a free one, because the whole thing rests on liking him. He is a dog, so he is informal in every language that distinguishes: du, tu, tú, jij, ty. Never Sie, vous, usted.
Deutsch日本語TürkçePortuguêsעבריתPolski한국어+29 more
A short glossary fixes the words that carry the metaphor: a treat must stay a thing a dog eats, a walk is the literal dog walk, and sit uses your language's actual dog command, because it's a pun and should stay one.
WHAT IT COSTS

The free tier is whole,
not crippled.

Free Scrappy guards your worst hour. Pro Scrappy runs your whole week. One rule is honestly enough for a lot of light users, and pretending otherwise would poison the brand.

Free
$0
One rule, any rule off the shelf, over any number of apps. Every safety rail. Honest stats. The guard genuinely works.
Start free
BEST
Yearly
$1.67a month
$19.99 per year · free trial
Unlimited rules, rules per app, longer walks, deeper insight.
Start the trial
Once, forever
$39.99
His forever home. One payment, and he's yours.
Adopt him
Safety rails stay free
Paywalling the thing that prevents a lockout is indefensible.
Honesty stays free
The stats never tease a number they're withholding.
The first rule is whole
Any rule from the shelf, with the gate on the second one.
Treats stay earned
The paywall sells the dog's time, never his affection.

Go on then.
Give him the job.

Free forever with one rule and every safety rail. He'll be at the door either way.

Scrappyv1.0 · iOS 18+ · Swift 6
Not parental control. Not a tracker.