How it works
Four moving parts, and none of them are clever. The whole design is about where the interruption lands rather than how hard it hits.
Part one
You choose which apps are rationed. Everything else on the phone is left alone. When you open a rationed app, a clock starts at 3 minutes.
The clock runs whenever that app is in front, whichever screen you are on. Reels, Stories and your DMs all spend the same minutes. Skerrick cannot tell them apart. On Android it only knows which app is in front, and on iPhone it only hears when the app opens and closes. Seeing more would take accessibility access, which lets an app read everything on your screen, and Skerrick does not ask for it.
So limiting Instagram is how Skerrick limits Reels. A message you stop to answer comes out of the same ration. A reply takes seconds, though, and it is the scroll that turns a visit into forty minutes.
3 minutes is the default rather than a rule. You can set it higher, and a lot of people should, especially if they also use the app to talk to people. Starting at ten and walking it down over a fortnight works better than starting at three and turning the whole thing off on day two.
01
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. One of them is the problem. Choose it and leave the rest of the phone alone.
02
3 minutes a visit by default, counted whenever the app is in front. Reels, Stories and DMs all spend the same minutes.
03
On Android the cut-off lands over the app where you are. On iPhone a notification tells you, and the app opens on the cut-off until the ration refills, 30 minutes after you leave.
Part two
At zero, Skerrick calls time. You are not warned at 2:30 and you do not get a grace period, because a warning is just an invitation to start a last scroll. How the cut-off reaches you depends on the phone.
On Android, a full-screen card lands over the app, mid-scroll, and covers whatever you were looking at.
On iPhone, one app is not allowed to close another, so Skerrick does not pretend to. A notification says “Not a skerrick left.” Tap it and the card comes up. Keep scrolling and nothing stops you, but the next time you open the app with nothing left, Skerrick comes to the front on the card instead.
From the card you can close the app, or you can ask for sixty more seconds. Asking is allowed. It is the third part of the design, not a loophole in it.
Not a skerrick left.
You opened Instagram 11 minutes ago.
Refills in 29 min.
Part three
The first time you push through on a given day, you wait five seconds. The second time, twenty. Then forty-five, then ninety. The button is always there and it always works. It simply costs more each time.
The reason is that a fixed delay is a delay you learn. Published research on app-opening friction found the effect real at first and fading over the following weeks, as people habituated and pushed through more often. A wait that responds to how much you have already pushed through today does not flatten out in the same way.
The ladder resets at midnight. No day inherits yesterday’s punishment.
| Push-through | Wait | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 5s | Barely anything. That is the point. |
| 2nd | 20s | Long enough to notice you are waiting. |
| 3rd | 45s | Long enough to put the phone down. |
| 4th | 90s | Most people never get here. |
Part four
Stay out of the app for 30 minutes and the ration returns to full. Come back sooner and you get whatever was left. This is what stops the obvious workaround, which is closing the app and immediately reopening it for a fresh 3 minutes.
It is also the part that does the quiet work. A feed you can visit roughly twice an hour for three minutes is a feed you visit on purpose, and visiting on purpose is most of the battle.
Setting it up
Skerrick does not use Apple’s Screen Time permission. It uses Shortcuts. During setup it walks you through two personal automations for each feed. One says: when Instagram is opened, run Skerrick’s Run intervention. The other says: when it is closed, run End visit. They run in the background, so with time left you stay in your feed and nothing interrupts you.
The only permission it asks for is notifications, and only for the alert that says your ration has run out. Without it the cut-off still comes, but only the next time you open the app.
Two switches, and Skerrick walks you to each one. Usage access lets it see which app is in front. Display over other apps lets it draw the cut-off over the app. It may also ask to be left out of battery optimisation, because some phones quietly stop anything running in the background.
What it counts
Skerrick is not an app blocker. The app stays installed and signed in, and while you have time left nothing in it is interrupted. What it counts is all of your time in the app, not just the scroll.
On iPhone you can ration Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Reddit, Threads and Pinterest. On Android, any app on the phone.
Afterwards
Once a week Skerrick prints a receipt: time in each app, the total, the change on last week, and how many times you pushed through. It is a plain list of numbers with no encouragement attached, which is the only form of this that anyone actually reads twice. It is in the free tier, and you can share it.
SKERRICK
WEEK 37 · MON TO SUN
FEED TIME
70:13
VS LAST WEEK
−31:46
PUSHED THROUGH 6 TIMES
Questions
Yes. The clock runs whenever the app is in front, whichever screen you are on. On Android Skerrick only knows which app is in front, and on iPhone it only hears when the app opens and closes, so a DM spends the same minutes as Reels.
The clock pauses. Come back inside thirty minutes and you pick up the remainder. Stay away for thirty minutes and it refills to the full ration.
No. The ladder resets at midnight, local time. Every day starts back at five seconds.
Yes, from inside the app, in a few taps. It is not a prison. It is a speed bump you chose to put in your own road.
More of these on the full FAQ.
Waitlist
One email, on the day it is out. Nothing else.