Astropause – the app that encourages you to take meaningful breaks from your phone.
Check out our homepage
Help your friends stay focused on their studies during this busy finals season.
Visit the leaderboard to see who’s spending the most time away from their phone.
Use this focus timer to stay on track and concentrate on any task at hand.
Your Astro Pet keeps you focused by gently blocking distracting apps when you need to stay on track.
You've exceeded your set time limit on YouTube—time to take a break and let your Astro Pet thrive!
Just a gentle nudge to make sure you're not doom scrolling for too long
Here is your offline journal and mood analysis to reflect on what you’ve been up to and track your growth during your time offline.

Astropause

Elevator Pitch

Astropause is a wellness app that helps you pause from your phone by caring for a space pet that thrives the longer you stay offline.

Inspiration

In a world overwhelmed by notifications, doomscrolling, and digital burnout, managing screen time has never been more important or more difficult. Despite tools like Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing dashboards, many users find them too passive, confusing, or easy to ignore.

From our own experiences and a user survey with 28 participants, we discovered a common pain point: people want help staying off their phones, but they also want that help to be engaging, motivating, and nonjudgmental. That inspired us to create Astropause, a playful yet powerful way to build healthier digital habits.

What it does

Astropause is a gamified wellness app where users care for a space pet that grows stronger the longer they stay offline. Here’s how it works:

Stardrops: Earn 1 stardrop for every hour spent away from your phone. Your space pet depends on these to thrive.
Friendly Competition: Compete with friends for the most offline time. Use chat to send encouragement.
Focus Timer: A built-in timer helps you concentrate on tasks and avoid distractions.
App Restrictions: Limit access to your most-used apps for mindful usage.
Journaling and Mood Tracking: Reflect on what you did offline, log your mood, and visualize your growth over time.

Inspired by Tamagotchi, Astropause blends nostalgic virtual pet care with modern mindfulness to make disconnection feel rewarding. It’s not just a productivity tool—it’s a wellness companion that helps you unplug with purpose.

How we built it

Conducted user research via Google Forms with 28 participants to understand habits, struggles, and preferences.
Designed the full experience in Figma, from low-fidelity wireframes to polished high-fidelity screens.
Referenced iOS Screen Time API concepts for tracking and app usage logic (conceptually).
Used behavioral design and gamification principles to align motivation with habit-building.

User Research

We conducted user research through a Google Forms survey with 28 participants, primarily targeting young adults aged 18–24 who are students or early-career professionals. This demographic was selected due to their high phone usage for both social and academic or work-related purposes.

The survey uncovered three main pain points:

Screen Time Is Deeply Integrated into Social and Daily Life: 88.9% of respondents said that screen time is part of their social life, and 66.7% need it for work or school. This made cutting back feel difficult without feeling isolated or unproductive.
Lack of Motivation and Follow-Through: 50% of participants had only thought about managing their screen time but had not taken action. 33.3% cited lack of motivation as a barrier, and few had tried existing tools like app blockers or Screen Time.
Existing Tools Are Not Engaging or Supportive Enough: Users expressed a desire for features like gamification, gentle nudges, visual feedback, and customization. Many disliked features like mood tracking, finding them too passive, and preferred fun, friendly, and non-punitive experiences.

To address these pain points, we designed Astropause to make disconnection engaging and motivating through a gamified pet care experience. The app rewards users for staying offline and provides tools like a focus timer, app restrictions, and journaling to encourage mindful screen time management. It’s designed to feel supportive, not punitive.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing fun and accountability—making the app feel playful but still effective.
Designing for realistic behavior—anticipating users’ desire to cheat or disable features.
Ensuring social features remained supportive, not competitive in a negative way.
Simplifying the concept—while we wanted to address all the user suggestions from our research, our mentor made a great point: the main goal is to help users disconnect, not create a new addiction. We had to keep features that help users grow and avoid doomscrolling without adding more distractions or making the app another source of screen time addiction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built the entire app concept within just three days, overcoming challenges through iteration and feedback.
Stayed realistic about the work we could achieve within such a short period, focusing on quality and feasibility.
Managed to design an engaging and effective app concept that balances fun with meaningful digital disconnection, all within a limited timeframe.

What we learned

Our generation truly needs a little push of motivation to be proactive due to our dependance of technology .
We learned how to create a gamified app that encourages users to stop using their phone, which can be tricky.
Understanding the user group by asking them about their struggles and how we can support them is crucial before building any product, because at the end of the day, they are the ones who will be using it.

What's next for Astropause

Develop a widget feature so users can easily check on and remember their pet without opening the app. The widget will provide quick access to view their space pet’s current status, see how many stardrops they've earned, and track how much time they've spent offline. Additionally, the widget will display the ongoing focus timer, allowing users to see how much time they have left on their focus session without having to open the app. This will help reinforce their commitment to staying off their phones and stay motivated while working on tasks, all without interrupting their flow.