This summer, my wife set an audacious goal: she wanted to log 1,000 hours of phone-free time with our family. To track it, she’d put away her phone and start a manual timer. At first, it was great. But between managing two young kids and constantly forgetting to start or log the timers, the friction just became too much effort. After about 120 hours, she gave up.

I wanted to find a way to handle the data collection for her so she could just focus on being present. The problem is, I’m a school math teacher with a very limited, hobbyist programming background. I had never created anything close to a native Android app before.

With all the recent talk around "vibe-coding" and AI agents, I figured I’d see if I could cobble a solution together.

The result is GreenDot. It’s a native Android app built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. The core philosophy is pretty simple: not less phone, better phone habits. Instead of being a punitive screen blocker, it tracks your long lock durations and rewards you for taking intentional, 1-hour breaks away from the device.

The development process honestly went way beyond my expectations. I used VS Code (leveraging the education benefits) and did the vast majority of the heavy lifting using Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6. After a couple of days of prompting and debugging, I had a working prototype. After about three weeks of working in my spare time, I had a fully functional app live on the Play Store.

As someone without a formal CS background, it’s wild to me that these tools can democratize software development to this extent. It’s obviously not going to replace a software company, but it allowed a parent to ship a real, working tool over a few weekends to solve a hyper-specific lifestyle problem.

My wife is back to tracking her hours, and I've shared it with a few friends and family who have found it useful for disconnecting with their devices and reenaging with this lives.

I’m sharing it here because I'd love to get the community's thoughts—both on the psychology of rewarding lock durations rather than locking users out, and on the technical side of spinning up a native mobile app from scratch using LLMs if you've done something similar. Play Store Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greendot.p...