Pause & Prose: App Blocker
In-app purchases
Everyone
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About this app
Pause & Prose is an app blocker that gives you something to read: one great line of writing between you and the apps that pull you away.
Choose the apps that tend to swallow your evening. When you open one, Pause & Prose stops it and gives you something worth reading first — a line from Austen or Dickinson, Marcus Aurelius or Oscar Wilde. Read it, tap Continue, and the app opens. That is the whole idea.
No leaderboards. No shaming. Nothing to sign up for. Just a few good words at the moment you were going to read something else entirely.
Try it free, then keep it with a single purchase. No subscription, no ads.
YOUR SHELVES
A thousand or so lines of real literature, on six shelves: novels and tales, poetry, Shakespeare, philosophy and the Stoics, essays and letters, and wit and aphorism. Keep the shelves you love and turn the rest off, during setup or any time after. Everything on your shelves comes round once before anything repeats.
YOU SET THE PACE
Every locked app gets its own setting: ask every time, or at most once every 1, 3, 5, 15 or 30 minutes. The clock starts when you open the app, and you are never interrupted while you are using it.
LINES TO KEEP
Tap the heart on a line you loved and it waits for you in Favourites, ready to read again or share.
Add the lines that are yours, too: a sentence you underlined years ago, something a friend wrote to you, a line you keep coming back to. Type it, speak it, or photograph the page. Only the words are required — if you remember the line but not the book, save it anyway.
EVERYTHING IS ON YOUR PHONE
Nothing you read is fetched from anywhere. The whole collection is built into the app, so a pause opens instantly and works with no signal at all. Nothing you write leaves your phone unless you share it.
BUILT TO BE READ
Large type from the start, warm paper, generous touch targets, and state written out in words rather than signalled by colour alone. Body text is held to WCAG AAA contrast, and tested for it.
ABOUT THE WRITING
Every line comes from a public-domain original, and the standard for including one is strict: out of copyright in the United States, by an author who died more than seventy years ago, and traceable to a real page. The English is a public-domain translation, or our own. The lines everyone misattributes — to Eliot, to Twain, to Wilde — are left out on purpose.
HOW THE APP LOCK WORKS
Pause & Prose uses Android's Accessibility service to tell which app is in the foreground. That is the only way an app can know you have opened something on your block list. It reads the foreground app's name and nothing else: no screen contents, no text you type, no screenshots. Nothing is sent anywhere. You are asked to turn it on during setup, and you can turn it off at any time in Android Settings.
Character illustrations: free illustrations "Tegaki Desuno" (https://regeld.com/desi).
Choose the apps that tend to swallow your evening. When you open one, Pause & Prose stops it and gives you something worth reading first — a line from Austen or Dickinson, Marcus Aurelius or Oscar Wilde. Read it, tap Continue, and the app opens. That is the whole idea.
No leaderboards. No shaming. Nothing to sign up for. Just a few good words at the moment you were going to read something else entirely.
Try it free, then keep it with a single purchase. No subscription, no ads.
YOUR SHELVES
A thousand or so lines of real literature, on six shelves: novels and tales, poetry, Shakespeare, philosophy and the Stoics, essays and letters, and wit and aphorism. Keep the shelves you love and turn the rest off, during setup or any time after. Everything on your shelves comes round once before anything repeats.
YOU SET THE PACE
Every locked app gets its own setting: ask every time, or at most once every 1, 3, 5, 15 or 30 minutes. The clock starts when you open the app, and you are never interrupted while you are using it.
LINES TO KEEP
Tap the heart on a line you loved and it waits for you in Favourites, ready to read again or share.
Add the lines that are yours, too: a sentence you underlined years ago, something a friend wrote to you, a line you keep coming back to. Type it, speak it, or photograph the page. Only the words are required — if you remember the line but not the book, save it anyway.
EVERYTHING IS ON YOUR PHONE
Nothing you read is fetched from anywhere. The whole collection is built into the app, so a pause opens instantly and works with no signal at all. Nothing you write leaves your phone unless you share it.
BUILT TO BE READ
Large type from the start, warm paper, generous touch targets, and state written out in words rather than signalled by colour alone. Body text is held to WCAG AAA contrast, and tested for it.
ABOUT THE WRITING
Every line comes from a public-domain original, and the standard for including one is strict: out of copyright in the United States, by an author who died more than seventy years ago, and traceable to a real page. The English is a public-domain translation, or our own. The lines everyone misattributes — to Eliot, to Twain, to Wilde — are left out on purpose.
HOW THE APP LOCK WORKS
Pause & Prose uses Android's Accessibility service to tell which app is in the foreground. That is the only way an app can know you have opened something on your block list. It reads the foreground app's name and nothing else: no screen contents, no text you type, no screenshots. Nothing is sent anywhere. You are asked to turn it on during setup, and you can turn it off at any time in Android Settings.
Character illustrations: free illustrations "Tegaki Desuno" (https://regeld.com/desi).
Stop doomscrolling: one great line of literature before a distracting app opens.
Updated on
Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time.
- No data shared with third partiesLearn more about how developers declare sharing
- This app may collect these data typesApp info and performance and Device or other IDs
- Data is encrypted in transit
- Data can’t be deleted
What’s new
Read your own book at your pauses. Add an EPUB, or start with Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes or Walden, and each pause opens where the last one stopped. Keep reading for more, and change how much a pause shows with the new icon at the top.
Hold any word on a pause to see what it means. The words you look up wait in Your words, on the Quotes tab, each with the line you met it in.
Hold any word on a pause to see what it means. The words you look up wait in Your words, on the Quotes tab, each with the line you met it in.
App support
About the developer
HACKNEY HACKERS LTD
tomislavm@hackneyhackers.com
1F Manley Court
LONDON
N16 0PB
United Kingdom
+44 7428 929143