MindShift: Focus & App Blocker

MindShift - Pause Before You Scroll

You opened Instagram for "just a quick check" and lost an hour. Sound familiar?

MindShift puts a small, deliberate moment between your hand and your distracting apps: a chess puzzle. Solve it, and the app opens. Skip it, and your phone gives the time back to
you.

How it works
1. Pick which apps to guard - Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X, anything you reach for on autopilot.
2. Tap a guarded app on your home screen. MindShift presents a chess puzzle.
3. Solve the puzzle, or tap "Give up". The app opens either way.

That tiny gap is often enough to break the autopilot loop. On hard days you solve the puzzle and use the app anyway. On good days you put the phone down without finishing.

What's inside
• Thousands of curated chess puzzles from the Lichess open database (CC0)
• Difficulty levels from beginner to grandmaster - pick what feels challenging without being painful
• Clean, classic chess board with Merida pieces and Lichess-style move indicators
• Stats screen - track completed vs given-up challenges, by app, over time
• Pause for a while - temporarily lift the guard for 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 4 hours when you need it
• Pause for banking - one-tap walk-through to temporarily disable the accessibility service for banking apps that refuse to launch alongside it

Privacy: minimal data, fully disclosed
MindShift does not collect, sell, or share personal data. Your guarded-app list, puzzle history, and stats live only on your phone - they are never uploaded.

The one outbound network call is anonymous crash reports to Google Firebase Crashlytics: stack trace, device model, OS version, app version. No user content, no identifiers tied to
you. Crash reporting is disabled in debug builds.

Full privacy policy: https://vivekyd6.github.io/mindshift-policies/

Permissions, explained honestly
• Accessibility service - the only way Android lets us detect that you just opened a guarded app. We read the package name only. Not screen contents, not text, not notifications.
• Foreground service - keeps the guard active in the background.
• Internet - used solely to upload anonymous crash reports to Firebase Crashlytics. No user content is ever transmitted.
• Query installed apps - so the app can show you the list to pick from. We use the standard package-visibility queries mechanism; we do not use QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES.

We do not request location, contacts, camera, microphone, storage, SMS, call log, or any other sensitive permission.