CurtailCat Gatekeeper doesn’t run on Android yet
You probably read about it in Fast Company or PCWorld, went looking for it on your phone, and found a browser extension. That is correct: Cat Gatekeeper is a browser extension with a desktop app beside it, and as of 12 September 2026 its own download list still says “Use on Mobile - Coming soon”.
Curtail is a screen time app for Android that works the way you were hoping theirs would. You set a time limit on the apps that eat your evenings, and when it runs out a cat walks onto the screen and sits on whatever you were reading.
It’s a different app by a different person, and it disagrees with theirs about one thing: whether you should be able to get past the cat.
Curtail is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Cat Gatekeeper or ZOKUZOKU. Cat Gatekeeper is their app and their name, and this page names it because that is what people are searching for when they want this on a phone. The official one is zokuzoku.github.io/cat-gatekeeper, which is the only page that links their real releases. They also ask people to watch out for similarly named apps and sites, which is worth repeating. Curtail is not one of those. It does not use their name or their artwork.
The two side by side
Everything in their column comes from their own store listing and site, checked 12 September 2026.
| Cat Gatekeeper | Curtail | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | A browser extension and a desktop app. Their own site lists a mobile app as coming soon. | Android 8.0 and up. No browser version, no desktop version, no iPhone. |
| What it guards | Websites you put on a list, in the browser it is installed in. | Any app on the phone you pick, guarded by the app itself rather than by the site it loads. |
| What the cat does | Covers the browser window until the break has run its course. | Walks onto the screen, sits on the app and blocks your taps. You can still see what is underneath. |
| Can you get past it | The break is designed to see itself out. | Yes, from the notification, in about four seconds. It costs your streak a day and nothing else. |
| Settings | A usage limit and a break length, both adjustable. | The same pair, plus a bedtime window, a daily cap, per-app timers and a widget. |
| Price and source | Free. The current source is published under their own source-available terms, all rights reserved, and the cat artwork is reserved separately. | Free, no ads, no account, nothing to buy inside. Closed source. |
| Who makes it | ZOKUZOKU. | One person in Vilnius, and no relation to the above. |
Their cat won’t move. Mine will
Everything else in that table is detail. This is the part where the two apps disagree.
Cat Gatekeeper’s break is built to see itself out. That’s a defensible design: if the point is to stop you, then stopping you is the product, and plenty of people want exactly that.
Curtail’s cat can be sent away from the notification in about four seconds, on purpose. A block you can’t beat gets uninstalled the first time it’s inconvenient. So Curtail costs you one reach to somewhere else on the phone instead, and that reach is usually enough to turn autopilot into a decision.
If you already know that about yourself and want the wall, take the wall. I would rather you cut your screen time with someone else’s app than not cut it.
The longer argument, with the research behind it →
The cat also keeps a diary
A break lasts a few minutes. The rest of the week is the part that decides whether you still have the app installed in March.
Curtail keeps a streak, and it counts the days you didn’t send your buddy off early. It’s built to forgive. One bad day a week is simply absorbed, days you barely touch your phone count as clean, and a rest day you declare on purpose scores the same as a good one. Sitting through a break is never a failure. Only cutting one short costs you anything.
The diary is mostly a record of the good days: the times you closed a guarded app on your own before any timer made you, your longest stretch away, and a short letter every Sunday built only from things that actually happened that week. There’s no chart of your worst week anywhere in it.
Nothing you do makes the cat die, sulk, or hold it against you.
What Curtail doesn’t do
You mostly scroll on a laptop
Curtail is an Android app and nothing else. It can’t see your browser tabs or your work machine. If the evening you’re trying to get back is spent at a keyboard, this is the wrong tool and you want a browser extension.
You want per-site limits
Theirs counts a list of sites separately. Curtail guards whole apps, so putting Chrome on the list covers every site in it at once. Blunter, and occasionally the wrong shape for what you want.
You have an iPhone
Curtail draws a cat on top of other apps, which iOS does not let any app do, so there is no iPhone version and there is not going to be one. Their desktop app will at least cover the computer.
You want to read the code
Cat Gatekeeper publishes its current source under its own source-available terms, so you can read it even though it is not an open licence. Curtail publishes none. What it offers instead is a manifest with no internet permission in it, which you can check on the Play listing without reading a line of code.
Nothing leaves your phone, and it can’t
Screen time apps see which apps you open and how long you stay, which is about as intimate as phone data gets. Curtail has no account, no server and no network permission of any kind, so there is nowhere for any of it to go.
That last part is the one worth checking rather than believing. The Play listing’s permission list is public, and INTERNET is not on it. An app without that permission cannot make a network call at all; Android refuses on its behalf.
The privacy policy, one page →
What people ask before switching
Is there a Cat Gatekeeper app for Android?
Not as of 12 September 2026. Cat Gatekeeper ships a browser extension and a desktop app, and its own site lists mobile under "coming soon" without naming a platform or a date. If you’re reading this on your phone, there’s nothing of theirs to install yet. Worth knowing: they warn that official releases are linked only from their own site, so if you do find something calling itself Cat Gatekeeper in an app store, check it against that page first.
Is Curtail made by the Cat Gatekeeper team?
No. Curtail is a separate Android app by a different person, with no affiliation to ZOKUZOKU and no shared code or artwork. The two apps landed on a similar idea, which isn’t that surprising: a cat sitting on the thing you’re trying to look at is a fairly obvious joke once you’ve had a cat.
What is the difference between Cat Gatekeeper and Curtail?
Two things. Theirs guards websites in a browser and mine guards apps on a phone, so they cover different halves of the same day. And theirs holds the line where mine lets go: Curtail costs you one reach to get past it, because a block you can’t beat tends to get uninstalled the first time it’s inconvenient.
Does Curtail block websites too?
Only in the sense that it can guard your browser as an app. Pick Chrome in the app picker and the budget covers everything you do in Chrome, which is blunter than a per-site list. If per-site limits on desktop are what you need, Cat Gatekeeper does that and Curtail doesn’t.
Can I use both?
That’s what I’d do. They don’t overlap: their extension takes the laptop, Curtail takes the phone, and neither one knows the other exists.
The phone is the half nobody’s guarding
Curtail is free on Google Play, with no ads, no account and nothing to buy inside. Install it and meet Cash. If something is off, hello@curtail.app reaches me directly and I read everything.
or write to hello@curtail.app