Skerrick: Block Reels & Shorts Live

Skerrick rations the app instead of blocking it. You keep Instagram. You just get three minutes in it per visit. When the ration runs out, the cut-off lands over the app mid-scroll and Skerrick tells you so plainly: Not a skerrick left. Skerrick only knows which app is in front, not which screen you're on, so the ration covers the whole app. Reels, Stories and messages all spend the same minutes, and limiting Instagram is how it limits Reels. The app is never blocked or deleted, so a message still gets answered, inside the same minutes. It refills after thirty minutes away. If you want sixty more seconds you can have them, but you have to wait for them, and the wait gets longer every time you ask. Five seconds, then twenty, then forty-five, then ninety. The count starts again at midnight, and where the ladder starts is read off your own last week: it climbs while you keep pushing through and falls back when you stop. WHY THE WAIT GROWS Because a fixed delay stops working. In a published field experiment, a short pause with a clear way to dismiss it led people to abandon about one in three app opens. A follow-up study of more than a thousand people over three months found the effect fading week by week as they got used to the pause and pushed straight through it. So Skerrick's friction goes up as you get used to it. As far as we know, nothing else does this. WHAT YOU GET, FREE - One app, with the whole mechanic: the ration, the cut-off, the refill and the escalating wait. - Three minutes per visit, or one, or five, or ten. Your call. - A cut-off that lands mid-scroll, not a lecture before you open the app. - Today's numbers, and a weekly receipt of where the time went, made to be shared. - No account. No email. No sign-up. WITH PRO - Every other app you want to ration, each with its own ration. - Lights Out: every rationed app shuts at bedtime and the phone becomes a clock. - The ration on your home screen, as a widget. PERMISSIONS Android needs two switches to do this, and Skerrick walks you to each one: usage access, so it can see which app is in front, and display over other apps, so the cut-off can appear. It may also ask to be left out of battery optimisation, so your phone doesn't quietly stop it after a few days. It does not use an accessibility service. PRIVACY Nothing you scroll leaves your phone. Skerrick sees which app is in front, nothing else, and only acts on the apps you pick. There's no advertising, no analytics and no advertising identifier. Backup is off unless you turn it on in the You tab. Turning it on signs in with your Google account, so the backup can follow you to a new Android phone. Google shares that account's name, email address and profile-photo link with our sign-in provider, Google Firebase, and they are stored alongside the backup, with an account id, the apps you ration, your settings and your weekly totals. Never what you watched or scrolled, because the app never had that to send. Turning backup off asks whether to delete the copy, and deleting removes it and the account. Subscriptions go through Google Play. Each time Skerrick opens, RevenueCat checks whether Pro is active, using an anonymous app user id it makes up and Google Play's purchase record, never your name, email or card. PRICING One app is free forever, with nothing crippled about it. Pro rations as many as you like, and adds Lights Out and the widget, at £4.99 a month, or £29.99 a year with the first fourteen days free. The free fortnight is on the annual plan only. Skerrick is a British and Australian word for the tiniest possible amount, almost always used in the negative. There's not a skerrick left.