Dopamine Ratt gets in the way of the apps that eat your day.

Open one of them and a rat with a placard is there first, holding the door shut for four seconds. Long enough to notice that you reached for it. Often long enough to change your mind.

HOW IT WORKS

Pick the apps you want interrupted. Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, whatever yours are. Every time you open one you get the sign, a short haptic knock, and a hold of four seconds. Then two ways out: BACK, which sends you home, or ENTER, which lets you through.

ENTER buys one visit. Leave the app and the next time you reach for it you are stopped again. There is no allowance to spend and no timer running down in the background. If an app is on your list, reaching for it is interrupted, every time.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

It interrupts the reach, not the scrolling. Once you are inside an app it has no idea what you are doing and no way to reach you.

It only notices entries through the normal app switching path, so a notification tap can occasionally land you somewhere without it catching you.

And the honest caveat for this whole category: novelty wears off in about two weeks. Interrupting the reflex is the easy half.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

No account. No sign in. No ads. No subscription. Nothing to buy.

Dopamine Ratt does not request the internet permission, so it cannot send anything anywhere. Not your app list, ing at all. That is enforced by Android itself rather than promised by us. Your list stays on your phone, isexcluded from cloud backup, and is deleted when you uninstall.

ACCESSIBILITY SERVICE API

Dopamine Ratt uses the Accessibility Service API to notice which app has come to the front, so that it can show the sign before you get in. The service is declared with canRetrieveWindowContent set to false, so it cannot read the contents of your
screen: not text, not messages, not what you type. It reads a single field, the package name of the app in frontst you chose, and forgets it. No personal information is collected and no data leaves your device.

MAKE IT YOURS

The sign is a rat holding a placard. Drop your own image into the app folder and it lights that up instead.

OPEN SOURCE

The whole thing is published, so none of the above has to be taken on trust:
https://github.com/mayilian/dopamine-ratt

Privacy policy: https://davidmayilian.com/dopamine-ratt/privacy.html