grod

What it does

Blocking Instagram outright also blocks your friends' stories and your DMs, so the blocker gets turned off by Friday. Blocking only the Reels tab does not work either: the home feed plays one video after another. grod does not care where in the app you are. It counts how long you scroll.

Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Snapchat, on the phone and in the browser. Messages, a post you open, a video you watch, search: none of that is scrolling, so none of it is slowed down.

On the phone, opening one of them first asks what for: a message opens at once with a short window grod learns from your own sessions; browsing waits. Say "just a message" and stay for half an hour often enough, and that answer stops opening at once.

Why it works this way

1. Friction that grows keeps working. People learn to ignore a pop-up; friction that grows the longer they scroll stayed effective longest in a 7-day study of short-video use.

   Meinhardt et al., IMWUT 2026. arXiv:2607.15818

2. A pause with a way out. With a short delay and the option to back out, people backed out of about a third of openings, and attempts fell by 57% over six weeks.

   Grüning et al., PNAS 2023. doi:10.1073/pnas.2213114120

3. The harm is the fast switching. In a study with 60 people, only the short-video group got worse at remembering a planned task.

   Chiossi et al., CHI 2023. doi:10.1145/3544548.3580778

How it works

One rules file drives every platform.

grod for Android

An accessibility service notices scrolling in the listed apps, without reading the screen, and shows the pause.

grod for Chrome

An extension counts scrolling on the listed sites and shows the same pause in the page. Works in any Chromium browser.

grod for macOS

A menu bar app to switch apps on and off and tune the pause, and the source of rules for the extension.

grod CLI

The grod command and an MCP server. Every change is checked against a schema before it is saved.

Tell your agent

Switch the basics in the Mac app's Settings. For anything new, open Claude Code and say what distracts you: the agent writes the rule, checks it and pushes it out. Nothing needs a rebuild or a reload.

"Reddit has been pulling me in lately, add it."
"The pause comes too late, make it 30 seconds."
"What's been distracting me this week?"

Notifications on the hour

On Android, grod can hold app notifications and deliver the originals together on the hour, or at fixed times. Calls and alarms still ring. In a field study with 237 people, notifications three times a day improved attention and mood, while turning them off entirely made people anxious (Fitz et al., 2019).

Once a week the phone hands its numbers to your Mac, and Claude Code suggests at most three changes, each backed by a number. You decide which to apply.

Wallpapers

The grod mark on a quiet background, for a lock screen with nothing to pull you in.

• Phone: dark · light
• Desktop: dark · light

Privacy

• Nothing leaves your devices. No accounts, no analytics, no server.
• The Android service only learns that you scrolled and in which app. It cannot read the screen.
• The extension talks only to 127.0.0.1. The Android app goes online only for a rules URL you set yourself and for looking up a channel you share to it.
• Logs stay in the app's private storage, are deleted after 30 days, and only adb on your own computer can read them.

Install

1. Android. Download grod-<version>.apk from the latest release and open it on the phone. Follow the checklist at the top of the app. On Android 13 and later, first go to Settings → Apps → grod → ⋮ → Allow restricted settings.
2. Chrome. Unzip grod-extension-<version>.zip, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked and pick the folder.
3. Everything else. The macOS app, the CLI and the agent need a clone of the repo. Full setup.

No iOS version and no Play Store build. Apps change their screens, so rules need upkeep; when something slips through, tell the agent.