Morning Shield

I built an app to stop myself doomscrolling every morning. 41 downloads and 3 paid upgrades later... here's what I've learned.

A bit about me first

I'm Josh, 18, final year A-Level student with exams in two weeks. I've been building things since I was a kid, made my first app at 14. Getting it published was its own adventure... I had to convince my dad to let me create a Google Developer account under his name because I was too young to have one. It was a basic conversation starter mixed pickup line app that I somehow decided needed full server functionality to let users rate them. Classic over-engineering.

After that I went through a game dev phase as most kids do, fun to build, not exactly professional releases. More recently I've been building websites for small businesses, the odd side project here and there. Morning Shield is my first real product though. First time I've built something and watched actual strangers use it and benefit from it. That part still feels a bit surreal honestly.

First time posting on Indie Hackers too! A friend pointed me here. Bear with me!

The problem I kept ignoring

My alarm goes off. I wake up. I grab my phone to turn it off and then spend the next 15-30 minutes scrolling before I've even got out of bed. Running late, rushed, tired, feeling genuinely poo-ey for the rest of the day.

I tried screen time schedules. I tried generic blocking apps. Nothing actually stuck. So I built something myself.

My app - Morning Shield

It's an Android alarm clock that automatically blocks the apps you choose the moment your alarm goes off. By the time you've dismissed the alarm, Instagram is already inaccessible. No willpower required.

Free to download, no accounts, fully offline, no subscription. There's an optional one-time upgrade (Protection Plus - £4.99) for scheduled blocks, warn mode and custom themes, extras to improve the digital detox.

I originally built it just for my portfolio. Then I showed a classmate who had the exact same problem, they loved it, told others, and suddenly people I barely knew were actively using it and requesting features. That's when I realised I should try to get it out there properly.

The technical bit (for the devs)

Native Android: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3. The blocking engine fires automatically alongside the alarm, so apps are already blocked before you've even touched the dismiss button. It's persistent across reboots too, recalculating based on timestamps rather than keeping a process alive.

Battery drain was my biggest worry. Solved it by checking the foreground app package name on open rather than polling every second like some blockers do. After lots of testing... no meaningful battery impact.

Widgets were a pain for me. Built with Glance (Compose-based) and they're not perfect yet. Themes and formatting are sometimes off but they're improving each version. Theming consistency is still a work in progress.

My views on AI - and use in this project

Everyone's talking about vibe coding and AI replacing junior devs. Genuinely worries me as someone trying to break into software engineering. My read: if companies stop hiring juniors because AI can do the work, and seniors fix what AI breaks. Eventually there are no seniors left to fix anything. I hope I'm wrong!

For this project, no major vibe coding, I enjoy coding too much! Just a bit of copilot autocomplete to speed up UI, and AI to sanity-check my grammar. That's it. The code is mine. Just wanted to be upfront about it.

Where I'm at

• 41 downloads

• 16 reviews, 4.9 stars

• 3 Protection Plus sales (£14.97 — more than I honestly expected)

• Just launched morningshield.co.uk

• Planning iOS this summer after exams, which means convincing myself a MacBook is a reasonable purchase

The hardest part hasn't been building it... it's been getting anyone to see it. No budget, limited time between revision sessions, learning ASO from scratch. Places like this are genuinely where I'm hoping to find people who've figured bits of it out, and have advice they can pass on!

If you've launched something small and organic and have thoughts, I'd really love to hear them. And if you struggle with morning doomscrolling, give it a go. It's free!

Morning Shield - On Google Play

Thanks for reading! I look forward to hearing takes from fellow Devs, entrepreneurs and more!

Cheers, Josh