CurtailThe cat walks in.
You look up.
Curtail puts a very patient cat named Cash between you and your feed. Set a scroll-time budget for the apps that eat your evenings. When it’s spent, Cash wanders onto the screen and sits there. You can watch. You can’t tap.
A nudge, not a lock. Dismissing him always works. Curtail just makes you notice you’re doing it.
Curtail is in closed alpha on Google Play. Joining is an email to one person: hello@curtail.app. I read everything.
Three things happen, in order
- 1
You set the budget
Pick the apps that pull you in and how long a sitting should last. Ten minutes is the default; budgets can be shared or per-app.
- 2
Cash arrives
When the budget is spent, Cash walks over your app and settles in, with a little countdown, until the break ends. Stay long enough and he falls asleep on your feed.
- 3
The break ends, or you end it
Wait it out and your time resets. Or dismiss him from the notification; there’s no penalty and no guilt screen. The one step of friction is the whole point: it turns autopilot scrolling into a decision.
The cat never dies
Other apps punish a bad day: a tree dies, a streak resets to zero. Curtail’s streak counts the days you didn’t dismiss Cash early, and it’s built to forgive. One bad day a week is simply absorbed. It’s called the grace day.
Serving a break is not failure, and days away from your phone count as clean. Nothing you do can hurt him.
- Nap day
- One tap pauses guarding until midnight. The streak sleeps through it.
- Bedtime window
- Optional. From 22:30 Cash goes on duty immediately, with no budget to burn first.
- Per-app timers
- Give each app its own allowance and its own independent break.
- Fresh start
- Walk away for twenty minutes and your timer restarts. Leaving is the behavior the app exists to encourage.
- Daily cap
- Optional ceiling on the whole day’s scrolling, on top of per-sitting budgets.
- Home-screen widget
- Cash, your streak, and today’s status at a glance.
The cat keeps a diary
Most screen-time apps hand you a chart of your worst week. Cash keeps a record book instead, and he is a shamelessly generous narrator.
The number he cares about is the walk-away: you closing a guarded app on your own, mid-budget, before any timer made you, then staying away a while (about twenty minutes). Nothing else in the app gets celebrated as loudly.
Cards only appear once you’ve earned them: your longest stretch away, the quiet nights, a letter from him each week (he keeps a season of the old ones), the year drawn as a mosaic. Your bond with him has six stages and only ever climbs. Nothing you do makes it fall.
He hands out badges too, and they stack: walk-aways, walks finished (breaks you sat out to the end), quiet nights (a bedtime window you never disturbed) and hands-off days (under your limits all day, no cat required) each climb a ladder, one medallion recast at every rung. The scale runs wood, copper, gold, amber, amethyst, opal; only the longest ladders reach the top. The locked ones sit in plain sight with the criteria spelled out, so you always know what’s ahead.
And if counting is the part that makes this worse for you, a switch called “Just vibes” turns every numeral in the app off. The cat, the streak and the stories stay.
Nothing leaves your phone
No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no servers: the app has no network code at all. It needs two permissions, seeing which app is open and drawing over it, and nothing about either ever leaves the device.
You don’t have to take that on faith. A screen inside the app lists every number it holds, how long it keeps it, and the one caveat that isn’t up to me: Android’s own encrypted backup will carry local data to your next phone. Two taps erase the lot.
Curtail is built by one person. There are no investors, no reason to sell anything about you, and nothing in the app to buy right now.
The things people ask first
If I can always dismiss him, what stops me?
Nothing, and that’s deliberate. A block you can’t beat gets uninstalled the first time it’s inconvenient. Curtail costs you one reach to somewhere else on the phone, and that reach is usually enough to turn autopilot into a decision. It’s aimed at the scrolling you didn’t choose, and it gets out of the way for the scrolling you did.
What if I need my phone in an emergency?
Curtail refuses to guard your phone app, messages, contacts, alarms, Settings and your home screen. They aren’t in the picker and can’t be added. It asks Android which apps those actually are, so it holds even if you use a different dialer, and it re-checks while it runs.
Is there an iPhone version?
No, and not honestly soon. Curtail works by drawing a cat on top of another app, which is something iOS doesn’t let any app do. Android 8.0 and up, for now.
Will it eat my battery?
It checks which app is in front once a second and otherwise sits still. There are no network calls to make, and nothing animates until a break starts. The likelier problem is the reverse: some Android skins kill background apps on sight. If that happens twice, Curtail offers to fix it, once, and never brings it up again.
What does it cost?
Nothing today: no ads, no account, and nothing to buy inside the app. Guarding your apps is what Curtail is for, and that part isn’t going behind a paywall. If I add paid extras later they’ll be things like new animations and more animals.
Can I use it on my kid’s phone?
No. Curtail guards the phone it’s installed on, has no accounts, and reports to nobody, so there’s nowhere for a second person to watch from. It only works if the person setting the limit is the person holding the phone.
How do I actually get it?
Curtail is in closed alpha on Google Play. Email hello@curtail.app, I add you to the tester list, and from then on Google Play installs and updates it like any other app. A public listing comes once the alpha has done its job.
What I’m building next
Curtail is finished, but I’m not done with it. Here is what’s coming. None of it changes how the guarding works.
Tango, who was here first
Tango was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and he was here before Cash was. He isn’t in the app quite yet: a dog that moves the way he did is a far harder drawing than a cat, and a bad Tango would be worse than none. He’s nearly ready, and he arrives free, exactly like Cash. The picker already has his place in it, greyed out until the day.
New things for Cash to do
Right now he walks in and sits. I’m drawing more: a long, unimpressed stare that lasts exactly as long as your break, and a butterfly he chases across your feed. Small, and bought once.
More than a cat
Not everyone’s animal is a cat. A parrot, a hamster, a fox, a few breeds of cat and dog, so the one who sits on your feed can be the one you’d actually want there. These are the paid part. Tango and Cash are not.
Next up: your own buddy
This is the next thing I’m building, not a someday dream: hand me a few photos of your own animal, and the one who walks onto your screen becomes them. Your dog, your cat, drawn the way Cash is drawn from photographs of the real Cash. The picker in the app already holds its place: “your own buddy, coming soon.”
This is the single part of Curtail that would ever leave your phone, so I’ll be straight about it: it’s opt-in, it’s paid, and it uses only the photos you choose to send, for only this. The free app keeps its promise: no accounts, nothing uploaded, nothing tracked. It’s a separate thing you’d go out of your way to ask for.
The cat on screen was a real cat
Tango came first, then Cash, who decided the two of them would be friends. They’re both gone now, and the app is where they keep walking. The on-screen Cash is traced from photographs of the real one: same walk, same green-eyed stare.
Their story →
Cash is ready when you are
Curtail is in closed alpha on Google Play: a small group of testers runs it every day, and there’s room for more. Email me, I’ll add you to the list, and Play takes it from there. I reply to every email myself.
or write to hello@curtail.app