A commitment device for your attention
meDecide shuts the apps you are hooked on for a length of time you choose. There is no undo, no snooze and no early release — because a block you can lift the moment you want it lifted is not a block.
iPhone and Android · €0.99 · No account, no tracking
Why it happens
The apps that are hardest to put down were built by people whose job was to make them hard to put down. Understanding how gives you something better to push against than self-blame.
Pull-to-refresh works like a lever. You do not know whether the next pull brings something good, and that uncertainty is precisely what makes the behaviour stick. Psychologists call it a variable-ratio schedule, and it is the most resistant to extinction of any reward pattern known — it is why slot machines look the way they do.
Infinite scroll removed the moment where a page ended and you decided whether to continue. Its own inventor has since called it a mistake and spoken publicly about the years of human attention it consumed. Nothing stops you now because nothing is designed to.
A notification is not a message. It is a bid for your attention, timed and worded by systems tested against millions of people. The average phone produces dozens a day, and each one costs far more than the seconds it takes to read.
After an interruption, getting properly back into a demanding task takes many minutes — and the residue of the last thing lingers while you try. Ten scattered check-ins do not cost ten minutes. They cost most of the afternoon.
The problem is not the twenty minutes you meant to spend. It is that the decision to stop has to be made again every few seconds, by a version of you the app has spent years learning to persuade.
How it works
Economists call this a commitment device: a choice made in a calm moment that binds you in a harder one. Ulysses had himself tied to the mast — not because he lacked resolve, but because he knew resolve was the wrong thing to rely on.
Make a selection — "Social", "Games", whatever the pull actually is. On iPhone the choice stays private: the system never tells meDecide which apps you picked.
An hour to get through a piece of work. An evening. A weekend. Or set a recurring window — every weekday from 14:00 to 16:00 — so the decision is already made when the moment comes.
The block runs down on a clock you cannot move, and releases itself the moment it expires — not a minute later, and never a minute early.
Not by asking twice, not by editing the selection, not by changing the clock. Adding time is always allowed; taking it away never is.
Time is measured against a counter the device will not let anyone set. Winding the date forward changes the number on your lock screen and nothing about when you get your apps back.
The block is enforced by the operating system, so it holds while meDecide is closed, while the phone is asleep, and after a restart.
What it can't do
A tool for keeping promises should not start by making ones it cannot keep. So here is what meDecide does not do.
Get the app
€0.99 on both platforms — bought once, no subscription. No account to create, no data collected, and nothing to cancel.
Links go live at release. Until then, meDecide is in testing.
