What makes all this Hard is the plethora of legitimate use. When I canceled home internet, I was unable to log in to work from home (five minutes a day in the evenings helps keep the compute cluster rolling). When I switched to a flip phone I started cooking less- the smartphone had made planning meals & shopping easier. When I remove Chrome, inevitably a week or two later I'm on the road and want to book a hotel or find a campground or check on road construction. When I switch my phone to greyscale, weather charts & maps become impossible to read.
Personally, if I was working on code & my goalposts were a commit to GitHub- well, without access to stackoverflow I might never be able to finish.
All that said, thank you for your perspective. It is not hard to believe many people do not actually want to change.
It's definitely a tough market. I suspect that it will be the larger corporations with enough revenue that can release such products into the market - and probably even release them as free features of an existing suite of products (e.g. iOS with Downtime, Disney's Circle[1], etc), as opposed to a standalone product.
I've lost weight with a phone app. I never could have done Weightwatchers or something like that before.
Also fitness apps are great in gamifying exercise a bit. Again another app has really helped me.
Actually gamifying good habits might help more than trying to remove bad habits with an app which might be the issue with apps to try and reduce digital addiction.
It's freemium and only a one time payment for pro (ie - not investor friendly) but I really enjoy being able to work on improving it every day. I sometimes get nice emails from people which helps motivate me more.
My app is called Cold Turkey (https://getcoldturkey.com). It's for Windows and macOS only, because of the security restrictions on smart phones. It uses browser extensions (with native messaging) to do the blocking, but if you disable the extensions during a block, Cold Turkey closes your browsers until you re-enable them.
On internet use restriction the best solution so far has been to use a simple electronic plug timer connected to a laptop without a battery. Zap - no internet for you.
There ought to be a solution that installs itself into the computer's firmware though. Most of us on HN install new operating systems at a much higher rate than the typical user so having a persistent solution would be huge.
This has been a known challenge for centuries. How did you address it during design of your product?
For full disclosure our product turns the Internet off until they complete goals like studying, completing quizzes, commiting to GitHub, etc.
Our first launch was a DNS only solution which we assumed lacked usage because people had to change their DNS address to one we spun up for them. It lacked usage and we assumed it was because it was "too technical" for parents.
Next we create an iOS app that worked out of the box as a VPN without any setup. We don't even ask the users to register in any way or pay anything.
Lastly we created a Chrome extension because it's the easiest way for tons of kids with Chromebooks to use.
Long story short, after multiple re-launches and trying to get feedback the overall result is that it's an almost impossible task to get parents or kids to change their habits, even if they "want" to. They will make up excuses and quit nearly instantly.