Pause & Prose: App Blocker

Pause & Prose is an app blocker for doomscrolling 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.

Or read a whole book that way. Add an EPUB, or start one of the three that come with the app, and every pause carries on from where you left off.

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 quotes from real literature, on six shelves: novels and tales, poetry, Shakespeare, philosophy and the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca), 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.


YOUR OWN BOOK

Read your own book, a passage at every pause. Add an EPUB, or start with one of ours: Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Walden. Each pause opens where you left off. Read the passage and carry on to your app, or tap Keep reading for more.

Choose how much each pause gives you: a sentence or two, a paragraph, or a page. Let your book have every pause, or every other one with the shelves taking the rest. Start again, or from any chapter, whenever you like.

EPUB files without copy protection work, such as those from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. Books bought in Kindle or Google Play Books are usually locked and cannot be opened here. The book stays on your phone: nothing is uploaded.


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, and a book you add is kept on your phone, so a pause opens instantly and works offline, 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).