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Pause is a screen-time iPhone app that stops mindless scrolling before it starts. Solve a quick puzzle to unlock Instagram, TikTok, or any app — and give yourself a real moment to choose.
It's late 2023, and I'm sick of wasting time on apps like Instagram and TikTok. The problem is these apps have molded our behavior, so you can't even check your phone without mindlessly opening them.
I chose to delete them off my phone, but that solution was only temporary, because as addicting as they are, they keep you informed of the world and connected to the people around you, and you to them.
So I ended up reinstalling them, only to fall back into the same mindless pattern.
But this isn't actually a willpower problem; it's a friction problem. iOS screen time limits are just too easy to bypass.
So I built Pause.
Pause uses Screen Time on iPhone to make you solve a puzzle before you open the app — that small bit of friction is enough to make you reconsider.
It's helped me come down from 9 hrs of Instagram a day to less than 1, and now each time I do scroll, it feels like meaningful time — 15-20 minutes, then I'm out again. I'm not missing anything, but I'm also not a slave to the scroll.
And the best thing: Pause just works in the background. Other than choosing your apps and the puzzles you'd like to solve, there's not much to keep track of — nothing to annotate, nothing to "complete." Set it up once and forget about it. There's no garden to tend, no streak to feel guilty about missing — if you want a streak, you earn it by staying away, not by opening the app and checking in.
It works with your Apple ID and stays on your device — I don't get access to anything, your email, your data, nothing. Everything stays with you.
There's a paid plan, of course, and a limited free plan that's helpful too sustained by ads.
At $4.99/month or $49.99/year and it has the potential to give you a handful of hours a week back.
Back to you. For productivity, for actual leisure, for hobbies, for the things and people you love.
Try Pause and let me know what you think!
@carlituser great app and awesome way to help us stop scrolling and loosing time!
The more I use it the more I can’t live without it, I’m blocking more and more apps that consume my time, the puzzles are hard enough to prevent me from wanting to open the app, but also easy enough that I can do them if I really need to check the apps. Thank you Carlos! You’ve given us the gift of time!
Does it works with shopping applications? Like amazon, or even zillow? There is also a lot of doomscrolling happing in those, and with Amazon, it can help think twice before you spend.
sometimes I open ChatGPT before even trying to think through the problem myself…how you decide when a pause is actually helpful versus when it would just get annoying?
It's tough to stand out in the screen-time space, but this actually looks different, too bad I'm an Android user. congrats for launch
About Pause on Product Hunt
“Pause. Before you scroll.”
Pause was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 18 upvotes and 19 comments, placing #69 on the daily leaderboard. Pause is a screen-time iPhone app that stops mindless scrolling before it starts. Solve a quick puzzle to unlock Instagram, TikTok, or any app — and give yourself a real moment to choose.
Pause was featured in iOS (110.9k followers), Productivity (661.5k followers) and Puzzle Games (4.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 206k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Pause?
Pause was hunted by Kshitij Mishra. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Pause stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Kshitij Mishra