https://github.com/idonov8/ScreenTime-Killer

<aside> 💡 Screen Time Killer helps you reduce your phone usage by raising the stakes. You set usage goal and a price to pay if you don’t reach the goal. You stay accountable, or pay the price.

</aside>

Lean Canvas (Explanation of idea)

Tasks & Ideas

Links

Design

Helpful dev resources

How to reduce my screen time?

🚧 The app is under construction. You can follow its development here. 🚧

Failed to launch within 30 days

what did i do then?

• created a design in Figma, iterated and improved it (first time designing with Figma)
• Developed an almost functional iOS app (first time working with swift)
  • Learned how to develop UI using swiftUI
  • implemented persistent storage using UserDefaults and appGroups
  • integrated Screen Time API extensions:
    • DeviceActivityReport - was used to display remaining time user has on their phone
    • DeviceActivityMonitor - was supposed to be used to notify the system when user passes their usage limit, but ultimately wasn’t done because I couldn’t figure out how to share data between the extension and the main app.
• Documented my progress in video format, posting a video almost every day. (22 videos)

Why did I fail?

• Underestimated the time of development - labeled as ‘weekend project’ when in practice development would take more then a month. Reasons for that mistake include:
  • I never developed for iOS before, and assumed it would be easy
  • I didn’t code in a long time and assumed ChatGPT will do most of my work. While using LLMs really sped my work, when getting stuck on weird bugs it wasn’t so magical.
• “fell in love” with the idea - failed to pivot when it became apparent development takes more time then expected.
• Got burned out - in the beggining of the project I put special effort to limit my daily work time, but as time went on and the deadline approached, I payed less attention, started working more hours but less efficiently, and by the end got burned out and didn’t want to work.