Soma: blocking your phone is half of it, the other half is what you do instead

Soma is for people with the same problem: they genuinely want to do other things, but the phone is always there and always the easiest option, so the time never shows up.

There is a wider shift behind it. Younger people are looking for real-life experiences: fewer dating apps, less drinking, more phone-free events and “no socials” meetups. They still want connection. They just want it off the screen.

Screen Time is one of Apple’s most locked-down frameworks: the app can’t read your usage directly, and blocking runs in separate extensions. I designed every feature around what the system allows instead of fighting it.

The harder constraint is human. Social media is engineered for dopamine, so a block only holds if what comes after it is just as rewarding. That is the bet behind swaps, friends and events: the block is the easy part; the replacement is the product.

So I changed the story. Soma isn’t about blocking your phone. It is about blocking your phone and setting time for another thing. Every block is a session with a purpose, and that purpose gives you a reason to keep it.

Research backs this. Across 94 studies (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006), people who planned when and what they would do were far more likely to follow through than people who only meant to.

Sessions lock the apps you choose for a scheduled window or a timed stretch, and each one is named for what you’re doing instead.

Picture a train. You have a few stations to wait, everyone around you is on their phone, so you reach for yours. Instagram is blocked, so you open Soma instead.

Before anything else, Soma hands you a swap: one quick level of something you want to get better at, like chess, a memory game or a few pages of reading, then a breath. Seven swaps in all, each a level that takes a few minutes. The small gaps are where the time goes, so that’s where the swaps are.

Awareness is a score from 0 to 100 that you can check every day. Screen time alone misses the point: an hour on Instagram on a day full of other things isn’t the same as a day of only Instagram.

So the score weighs the whole day in four parts: phone time (40), sessions and events (30), progress (20) and urges turned into something else (10). Ten minutes on Instagram counts against you; apps you mark as grey-area or productive count for less; scrolling after 11pm counts extra. Joining an event is a plan; going is what counts.

And it’s judged against your own usual, like a chess rating: someone who usually spends six hours and has a four-hour day climbs; someone holding at one hour stays where they are. A number you don’t have is never treated as zero.

It is the app’s one colour story. Its band runs from faded lilac to warm gold as the score rises, and everything else stays neutral so the colour means something.

The goal was never just less phone. It is doing other things with the time you get back, and doing them with other people. Activities puts real events on a map, so the time Soma saves has somewhere to go.

Dark always, with content on shaded glass and a soft sunrise glow in the awareness colour rising from the bottom of the screen. Everyday choices use Apple’s own alerts and menus, Soma’s own cards are kept for its moments, and the voice stays short, plain and kind about slips.

Behind it sits a design system of type roles, spacing, radii and motion that every screen is built from.

I’ve been solo on Soma. I map out the experience, take a lot of the inspiration from my own life, and work directly with Claude to build it: the SwiftUI app, the Screen Time extensions, the Supabase backend, the UX and the UI.

Everything in the app has gone through me.

Soma is in TestFlight with developers and early users, in the last round of polish before launch.

Usage numbers come with launch. So far, everyone I’ve shown it to has been interested in using it.