The cat walks in.
You look up.

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 doomscrolling you didn’t choose, and it gets out of the way for the scrolling you did. Android’s own app timer in Digital Wellbeing closes the app and dims its icon until midnight, or until you go and delete the timer, a route everyone learns by the second day, and Apple’s has an Ignore Limit button. Curtail has the same door, with a cat in front of it.

Both, loosely, and neither exactly. Curtail counts your time in the apps you choose, like a screen-time tracker, and when the limit runs out it blocks the screen, like an app blocker. It doesn’t block distracting apps outright, and it isn’t a focus app with sessions to start. Screen time control is the nearest shelf label: one limit, and a cat when it runs out. The difference is the enforcement: a cat you can always dismiss instead of a wall you’ll learn to climb. Charts exist, but they’re written by the cat, and he rounds in your favor.

Doomscrolling, mindless scrolling, whatever you call the hour that disappears: interrupting it is his job, stopping is yours. It runs on autopilot, so Cash breaks in at a moment you picked back when you were thinking clearly: the budget runs out, and the feed gets a cat on it. Fair warning: people who block one app tend to start scrolling another, and the weather app is a popular refuge. If it comes to that, add the weather to his list too.

Dozens try, and most of them work by locking you out. Curtail reminds you to stop scrolling instead: you set a limit, and when it runs out Cash walks on and sits down on the feed until the break ends. You can read what’s behind him. You can’t tap it. Sending him away takes one reach, to the notification or to Curtail itself. What he won’t do is pick the Reels out of Instagram for you; he sits on the whole app, messages and all.

I won’t sell you a cure for something I’m not qualified to diagnose, and the largest study that logged people’s real usage found only a weak link between screen time and mood. What’s measurable is volume: most people spend more hours in feeds than they meant to, and say they’d like some of it back. Curtail is aimed at that gap, the scrolling you didn’t choose. It doesn’t claim anything past that. The plainer version: when your time in Instagram, TikTok or YouTube is up, a cat gets in the way. Call that less addictive if it turns out that way for you.

If brain rot is the fog after an hour of Shorts, then yes, modestly. You put a screen time limit on whichever app does it to you, and a cat sits on the screen when the limit runs out. You can still see the feed. You just can’t touch it. No diagnosis, no lock, no subscription. Some apps in this corner wall the feed off, some swap it for a better one; this one only interrupts.

That’s what the bedtime window is for. After the hour you pick, there’s no budget to burn: open a guarded app and your buddy is already on duty, so the scrolling in bed meets a cat instead of a feed. He stays until the window ends, 07:00 by default, so it’s wait for morning or send him off. Either way you noticed, which at 11pm counts for something, because nothing else in the room is arguing with you. I can’t tell you it will help you sleep, only that it interrupts. Nights you never open a guarded app at all count as quiet nights, and seven of them earn the first badge, the least dramatic reward in the app.

I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to. A moving animal does seem harder to autopilot past than a silent timer, and you set the limit once, on an afternoon when you’re thinking straight, rather than in the moment when you aren’t. Nothing here punishes a bad day either; the streak forgives one a week by itself. If that’s the kind of nudge that works on you, it costs nothing to find out.

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.

No, and not honestly soon. Curtail works by drawing a cat, or a large dog, on top of another app, which is something iOS doesn’t let any app do. Android 8.0 and up, for now.

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 (Xiaomi and Huawei phones, Honor included, are the usual ones) kill background apps on sight. If that happens twice, Curtail offers to fix it, once, and never brings it up again.

Nothing today: no ads, no account, no subscription, and nothing to buy inside the app. Guarding your apps is what Curtail is for, and that part isn’t going behind a paywall, ever. Anything paid comes later and is bought outright: new things for the animals to do, more animals, and eventually one drawn from your own.

No. Curtail is a screen time app for adults, or at least for whoever is holding the phone. It 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.

Curtail is a free screen time app on Google Play, for Android 8 and up. Install it like any other app: there’s no account to make and nothing to sign up for. If something feels off, hello@curtail.app reaches me directly.

A bit, and less than you’d hope. Pool 32 trials of people limiting their own social media and the effect on wellbeing is real but small. Take mobile internet away entirely for two weeks and it works properly, which is presumably why almost nobody does it twice. Curtail lands somewhere between those two, and the studies are on the why page with their numbers, so you can judge the evidence rather than take my word for it.