About Awake

Your phone is designed to hook you. The feeds are built to keep you scrolling, and you slip into a trance: you pick up your phone for one thing, look up, and an hour is gone. Day after day, that adds up to years of your life.

Awake helps you break the trance. Visual reminders pull you back to the life waiting outside the screen, so you can feel fully alive again.

Why app blockers alone don't work

You've tried app blockers. You've tried screen time limits. You disabled them within a week. They rely on willpower, the exact thing your phone is wearing down, and when the limit hits you just tap "15 more minutes" and keep going. A blocker can stop you opening an app. It can't break the trance that sends you back to it.

How it works

Pick the apps and websites that steal your life. You get a grace period first, to use them guilt-free. After that, a visual reminder slowly appears around the edges of your screen, and it grows stronger the longer you stay. Put the phone down and it fades away.

You can keep scrolling. But you won't want to.

Hellfire creeps in the longer you scroll.

Choose whatever breaks your trance. Hellfire, cracking glass and creepy crawlies make the scroll feel wrong. Aurora and sunlight remind you of the world you're missing. A judgmental cat makes it hard to keep a straight face. Text reminders show up alongside the visuals: "Life is outside." "Still here?"

Aurora between scrolls. A reminder of the world you're missing.

Visual reminders help you want to stop. When wanting isn't enough, Awake blocks too: set a rule to lock an app once you hit your limit. And for the times you hand your phone to a child, Child Lock sets a timer, lets you choose which apps they can open, keeps social apps off-limits, and locks the phone when the time runs out. Child Lock is a Premium feature.

Stay under your limit and your streak grows. Awake shows how far below your average you landed. Leaderboards are coming.

Zero minutes today, well below your average. The streak grows.

You don't need more guilt. You need something that wakes you up.

Awake is built by Akhil Puri, an independent developer focused on building tools that help people take back control of their attention.

Privacy First

There's no account and no sign-up, and Awake never touches your contacts, photos, camera, microphone or location. Your list of apps and websites stays on your phone. For websites on your list, Awake checks the address in your browser against that list, on your phone; the address is never saved and never sent to us. Child Lock's recovery email is optional, used only for PIN reset codes and PIN-change alerts, and deleted within 24 hours, and nothing your child does is sent to us. The app does send anonymous analytics and crash reports to Firebase (a Google service) to help fix bugs, including daily screen-time totals, but never which apps or websites you use. No ads, and no data is ever sold.