Momento

Open apps on purpose

Most of the apps we open, we open on autopilot. Momento puts a short pause in front of them: before a protected app opens, a little hourglass called Momo asks why you want to open it.

Momento is AppJoy's own product. You pick the apps you want to be more deliberate about. When you open one of them, Momento asks for your reason and for how long you want to use it. A session starts, and when it ends the app either nudges you (Loose mode) or locks you out again (Strict mode). Charts, streaks, widgets and Momo's reactions show how your habits change over time.

Features

• Reason prompt before a protected app opens, with typing or on-device dictation
• Timed sessions with Loose and Strict end modes
• Weekly and daily statistics for time, sessions and resisted attempts
• Home and lock-screen widgets, and a Live Activity on iOS
• An animated mascot, built with Rive, that reacts to your behaviour
• All data stays on the device and there is no backend

Why two native apps

Momento started as a Flutter app. The product depends on deep platform features: on iOS the Screen Time API (FamilyControls, ManagedSettings and DeviceActivity) shields apps, and on Android an accessibility service detects which app is opening. Those parts cannot be shared between the platforms, and the user interface needs to feel at home on each of them.

So AppJoy rewrote it as a SwiftUI app for iOS and a Kotlin app with Jetpack Compose and Material 3 for Android. The iOS app is the reference, and the Android app is kept in step with it. With AI-assisted development, writing the second native implementation takes a fraction of the time it used to, which reduces the main advantage of cross-platform frameworks: one codebase instead of two.

Which approach fits depends on the product. We compare the options in our guide on Flutter, React Native and native development.