Mado
An iPhone app blocker that puts a fifteen-minute window between you and the feed. Each app gets one to three sessions a day, and loosening your own limit does not take effect until midnight.
About
Mado is an app blocker for iPhone built on one observation: the problem is
rarely the app itself, it is opening the app without ever deciding to.
You pick the apps that pull you in. Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube,
news, whatever your list looks like. From then on, opening one of them does not
open a feed. It opens a shield, and the shield gives you two buttons and no
third. Close the app, or enter for fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes is the only unit Mado deals in, and every app gets its own
budget for the day. You set that budget by picking a focus mode: Shizuku
(滴, droplet) gives three sessions per app per day, Nagare (流, flow) gives two,
Izumi (泉, spring) gives one. Spend an app's sessions and that app is locked
until midnight. No extend button, no snooze, no five more minutes.
The part that makes it hold is what happens when you try to loosen your own
rules. Raising your session count or dropping an app from the list does not
take effect until the next midnight, while tightening applies immediately. The
version of you at 11pm cannot overrule the version of you that set the limit.
That is the loophole most blockers leave open, and closing it is the whole
product.
The shield is where the work happens. Doomscrolling is not usually a decision,
it is a reflex: the phone is already in your hand and the feed is already
loading before you notice. Mado interrupts the reflex, hands the choice back,
and counts what you decided. A hundred closed shields is roughly twenty five
hours that did not go into a feed.
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Optimize for long-term revenue even when it means forgoing short-term gains
LinkedIn explicitly declines revenue that would optimize a short-term metric at the cost of member trust or long-term retention. Pricing experiments are evaluated on a 5-year revenue model, not just the first year. This long-term revenue orientation is enforced structurally: there's allocated 'revenue we won't take' and the team has permission to decline short-term extraction tactics. The result is a subscription business running at several billion dollars in annual run rate.
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