For iPhone
Be where you are.
You make the promise. Cairn helps you keep it.
Cairn blocks the apps you open on reflex and holds the line by default. When you want back in, you decide what it costs to break your own promise.
Free for a month, then $19.99 once. No subscription, no ads, nothing collected.
Why the others don't work
The hole in every other blocker.
Most blockers break in the same place. The moment you want the app, you can turn the blocker off faster than you can open it. The block was never the weak part. The easy override was.
So Cairn's design work went into the unlock. Turning a block off costs exactly what opening it costs.
The unlock ladder
You set the price.
Every block has a cost to open, and turning one off costs the same. Pick the rung that fits how much you need to mean it.
Confirm
A single tap to confirm you mean it.
Cooldown
Wait it out as one slow breath, 15, 30 or 60 seconds, then a short window of access.
Effort
Pay a real price to get back in: type a passphrase by hand, solve a puzzle, or do a physical task.
In stone
No way in at all while it holds. It opens on its own.
That last rung is only offered where a block ends on its own: a scheduled window closes, a daily limit resets at midnight, and you can walk out of a place. A hard block never lifts by itself, so setting one in stone would leave deleting the app as the only way back. That isn't a commitment, it's a trap.
The access window is a ceiling you set while you're calm, and the length gets picked in the moment. At every gate, staying out is the button that's easy to hit.
When it holds
On your terms.
Block hard and always, or on a schedule, or once you've spent too long today, or whenever you're at a certain place. Turn on Vacation for a trip, or start a Focus session for the next stretch of work. While something is holding, it shows on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island.
The trail
Built out of what you didn't do.
Cairn never records what you did, so the reward is built out of what you didn't do. Keep every block you had on watch for a day and you earn one stone. Seven stones make a weekly cairn.
Back out of a gate and choose to stay out, and that counts too. Resisted moments are the one number that goes up.
A stone is a day, not a block. A quiet day under a daily limit earns its stone. A day with nothing on watch is a gap, not a miss.
Privacy
It stays on your phone.
Cairn has no account and no servers, so nothing about you reaches HYTimes. It goes further than that. When you pick apps, iOS hands Cairn an opaque token instead of app names, so Cairn can't see what you block even on your own phone.
Daily limits are counted by iOS, which tells Cairn only that a limit was crossed, never a minute count. There's no usage report because Cairn never had the data to build one.
There's one optional heads-up you can switch on, which warns you before a scheduled block starts and as you approach your own daily limit. A warning is only ever about something Cairn is about to do to you, never about how you spent your time.
Pay once
$19.99. Once.
Use everything free for a month. After that, one payment keeps Cairn for good, and it never comes back. Most apps in this category charge every year instead.
When the month is up, Cairn doesn't hold your phone hostage. Every block you made keeps running, and you can still open or turn off any of them at the price you set. The unlock is for building new ones.
Honest limits
What Cairn won't do.
- iPhone only. The hard blocking is an iOS feature with no real Android equal, so there's no Android version and no honest way to build one.
- It can't stop someone who deletes the app. Deleting Cairn clears its blocks. That's the safety net, on purpose.
- It needs the Screen Time permission. Without it, iOS won't let any app block anything.
- The nudges need time. The daily-limit prompts have nothing useful to say until you've used it for a couple of weeks.
Cairn is a commitment device, not a security product.
Keep up with Cairn.
Cairn is on the App Store now. Leave your email if you want to hear what comes next — new ways to block, what changed in an update, what's being worked on. A few times a year at most, and nothing else, ever.
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