Adults don't want parental control apps. They want a wall they choose themselves

I keep seeing the same mismatch in the screen-time category: a lot of apps are technically blockers, but they feel like parental control software. That is fine if a parent is the customer. It is a bad fit if the user is an adult trying to manage their own habits. The difference is not cosmetic. When a blocker feels like surveillance, adults bounce. They do not want an account, a dashboard, or the feeling that their phone behavior is being watched somewhere else. That is the gap I built SproutGuard for: built for adults blocking themselves , not kids runs on-device through Apple's Screen Time APIs no account no server no usage data leaving the phone App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sproutguard-screen-time-detox/id6768664921?ct=devto-adults I also put the positioning plainly on the product page: self-control, not parental control The hard lesson from launching it is that being right about the problem is not the same thing as being shareable . Privacy architecture matters, but users rarely tell friends about architecture. What they do share is something emotional or visible: a streak, a mascot, a challenge, a before/after feeling. So the current working question for me is not "how do I explain on-device privacy better?" It is: How do you make a self-control product feel human enough that people talk about it? Website: https://shantj.github.io/sproutguard/ If you've worked on consumer productivity or habit products, I'm interested in what actually made users talk about them.