TheCure

Once a day, at an hour nobody picks in advance, everyone in the same region goes offline together. Your selected apps shut for the duration. When the window closes, the app asks one question — did you stay off? Nobody can check. That's the point: streaks and a friends leaderboard only mean something if you answer honestly.

The design choice that makes it work is that the hour is shared and random. You're not resisting your phone alone at a time you chose when you felt strong — you're doing it at the same moment as everyone else, and the interruption is the same for all of you.

An app can't block other apps on iOS — only the operating system can. Apple exposes that through FamilyControls, and using it at all requires a special entitlement: you file a request explaining what you intend to do with it and wait for a human at Apple to approve it. Nothing can be properly tested before that arrives, so the slowest part of the project was paperwork.

Once granted, the design is deliberately blind. When you choose which apps to block, iOS hands back opaque tokens — the app is never told which apps you picked, by design. That selection is stored in a container shared between the app and a small extension that belongs to the system rather than to us.

That extension is what makes it work with the app closed. At the start of a cure, a silent push wakes the device and tells the system to begin monitoring; the extension then puts a shield in front of the selected apps until the window ends. Your phone enforces it locally — nothing about which apps you use ever needs to reach a server.

The idea was my co-founder's — a Stanford student who came across Flyte during his time at a university in France, reached out because he liked it, and asked if I'd build the thing he had in mind. We met up there and started. He took the product direction and the business side; I was the engineer, and I built and shipped the app. I never touched growth on this one, which is unusual for me and was part of why I said yes.

It's live, it works, and a little over a hundred people have it. We aren't pushing it right now. But it's used every day inside my school and my own group of friends — which was the honest test of whether the idea held up, and it did.