Open a blocked app and you meet a gate, not a wall. It asks for one breath, then you decide: hold still, or breathe a few cycles, and it opens for a few minutes. There is always an "I need this now" button, and it always works. Blocking is free here. Schedules, profiles, gate style, pass length. Forever. Around it: a focus timer, workouts, habits, breathwork, a free first-aid kit and a Nights room. Every focused minute draws a transit map. iPhone. Offline. No ads. Data stays on your phone.
Hi Product Hunt. I'm Sebastián, and I built this on my own.
The thing that started it: every app blocker I tried treated me like a problem to be contained. A wall, a countdown, a password I'd hidden from myself. It worked for about a week, and then I got good at defeating it, which is a strange skill to develop against yourself.
So Focus Tycoon does something else. Open a blocked app and you meet a gate. It says "One breath, then you decide" — you hold still for a moment, or breathe through a few cycles. Then it opens for a few minutes and closes again. There is always a button that says "I need this now", and it always works. You can turn back, and turning back earns you something. Nothing traps you.
Two things I want to be straight about, because they're the reasons the app exists in this shape:
Blocking is free. Not free-for-now, free. Apple's Guideline 4.10 says you may not monetise built-in system capabilities and it names Screen Time by name, so charging for app blocking was never really on the table for anyone. Schedules, per-activity profiles, gate style, pass length: all free, forever.
Your data stays on the phone. Health data, body metrics, progress photos, panic episodes, coping cards, mood notes and every word of guided writing are excluded from cloud backup outright, and journal text is stripped from session rows before anything is uploaded. Eleven tables never leave the device. The app works offline. There are no ads.
Around the blocking there's a focus timer, workout logging, habits, breathwork and a free first-aid kit for when overwhelm shows up, and a Nights room for winding down. Every focused minute draws a small transit network you can look at, which is the part I had the most fun making.
It's iPhone only, and it's early. I'd rather hear what's wrong with it than what's nice about it, so tell me. I'm here all day and I'll answer everything.
One question if you've ever tried a blocker and dropped it: what made you drop it?