📵 IN DEVELOPMENT

SpellBreak

A break reminder for when you've been staring at a screen too long.

Gently interrupting the “just five more minutes” spiral.

What it is

SpellBreak watches for specific apps you tend to disappear into, using Android's Accessibility Service, and gently overlays a break prompt after a while spent in them. Tap “just browsing” and it backs off for a cooldown period — but it has to actually stay off, which turned out to be the hard part.

How it works

  1. AppWatcherService detects a watched app coming to the foreground.
  2. After a set time, OverlayService shows the break prompt on top of the app.
  3. “Just browsing” starts a cooldown timer (TimerService) that's meant to survive leaving and returning to the app.
  4. An “exit-echo guard” (added after a real bug report) now ignores a stale re-open event Android's own gesture-nav animation can fire right after you've genuinely left a watched app — so the prompt stops reappearing on top of whatever you switched to.

Why it exists

The problem

The “just five more minutes” spiral is real, and easy to lose an evening to. SpellBreak's whole job is to notice it happening and interrupt it gently — but a prompt that fires at the wrong moment (or reappears right after you've left) trains people to ignore it, which is exactly what the recent exit-echo fix was protecting against.

Under the hood

Built directly on Android's Accessibility Service, in Java.

Android Accessibility Service Java AppWatcherService OverlayService TimerService
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