Curtail: Screen Time Pet

Curtail is a screen time app for Android. Pick the social media apps that eat your evenings, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or whatever yours are, and give yourself a time limit. When it runs out, a cat wanders across the screen, sits down on top of whatever you were reading, and stays a while.

You can still see what is underneath. You just can't touch it until the break is over. Curtail guards whole apps, so the cat sits on all of Instagram, messages and all.

There's no lock here, and no lecture either. Just a cat called Cash, or a dog called Tango, turning up to stop the scrolling once you have been at it a long time, and moving aside if you genuinely need the phone.


HOW IT WORKS

Choose your buddy first: Cash the Abyssinian, or Tango the Ridgeback. Both free, and no subscription. Then choose your apps; the usual time-sinks come pre-ticked and you can change them later.

Set your screen time limit and how long a break should be. Ten minutes and five is a sensible start; a one-minute limit meets your buddy faster.

Then just use your phone. When the limit runs out your pet arrives, and when the break ends it wanders off and your time starts over.

The rest is optional: a bedtime window, where the pet is on duty the moment you open a guarded app at night, with no limit to burn first, until the window ends at 07:00 by default; a daily limit across every guarded app; a warning before a break begins; and a home screen widget.


IT IS MEANT TO BE FORGIVING

Most screen time apps treat a slip as a failure, and you end up quietly resenting them. Curtail counts the good days and lets the rest go.

Your streak counts the days you didn't push the pet away early. Sitting through a break isn't a failure. Only cutting one short costs you anything.

One bad day a week gets absorbed on its own. A second one inside seven days resets the streak.

Days you barely touch your phone count as clean, and so do rest days you declare on purpose.

The pet doesn't die, sulk, or hold anything against you. Nothing in this app is designed to punish.


WHAT IT KEEPS TRACK OF

Curtail keeps a small diary, and it's mostly a record of the good days.

It notices when you put the phone down on your own, the breaks you sat all the way through, and your longest stretch away from a guarded app, which only ever goes up.

On Sundays your pet writes you a short letter, built only from things that actually happened that week. The bond deepens as the good days add up.

Good days earn badges that stack, one medallion per habit, recast from wood to copper to gold and beyond.

You can give the pet a name. The cat answers to Cash and the dog to Tango, from Tango & Cash, until you say otherwise. If numbers aren't what you want from this, there's a mode that puts them away and leaves you the pet, the streak, and the stories.


NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

Curtail has no account, no server, and no network permission of any kind.

No analytics, no advertising, nothing uploaded. There's nowhere for it to go.

A screen in Settings lists everything the app holds about you, and lets you erase any of it on the spot.

Two special permissions you grant by hand make it work. Usage access tells Curtail which app is in front. It reads no content, only the name of the app on screen. Display over other apps lets the pet appear.


WHAT IT IS NOT

The usual app blocker works by being impossible to get past. That lasts until the first time it's inconvenient, and then it comes off the phone. This is a nudge rather than a cage.

You can dismiss the pet, stop the guard, or uninstall Curtail in about four seconds, and it's built that way on purpose. No app can make you want something you don't want. What it can do is sit in the gap between you and the twentieth minute of doomscrolling, so the moment you decide to keep going is one you actually notice.