Set your own rhythm.
The sleep-first screen time app that protects the start and end of your day: Wind Down, Sleep, and Waking. So you wake up to a life you actually showed up for.
You promised yourself one episode. Then one more reel. Then 90 minutes are gone, your alarm is in five hours, and your phone is the only thing you've been honest with all night.
You've tried Screen Time. You've tried airplane mode. You've tried willpower. None of it worked, because none of it gave you something to do instead.
Don't resist the urge. Redirect it.
The science of breaking phone habits is counterintuitive: restriction backfires. When researchers took a friction prompt apart to see which piece did the work, the winner wasn't the pause or the warning. It was the off-ramp: somewhere for the urge to go instead.
Block-only apps wall you off and wait for your willpower to hold. It doesn't. Tempo builds the half of the equation everyone else ignores, the replacement, and that's the whole product.
It was never a willpower problem. It was a missing replacement.
Most apps want your whole day.
Tempo just needs the edges.
The bookends of your day decide everything else. Protect them, and the middle takes care of itself.
Three modes. One night.
Wind Down
Smart friction interrupts compulsive pickups. Replacement rituals give your evening somewhere to go: guided breath, a brain dump, a sleep story.
Sleep
Strict app blocking through the night. When you wake at 3am, the Return-to-Sleep hub gets you back under without doomscroll detours.
Waking
A morning that isn't a feed. Sunlight prompts, a single intention, gradual app unlocks. Your day starts with you, not the algorithm.
What a wind down feels like.
Tap a step to advance. Five minutes of decompression breath, two minutes of brain dump, fifteen minutes of a sleep story.
Twenty-two minutes that replace ninety minutes of scrolling. Same dopamine drop. Different ending.
See all rituals →The science is uncomfortably clear.
These are findings from peer-reviewed studies on the behaviors Tempo is built around, not results we're promising you.
This is the "cigarettes on airplanes" moment for phones.
Your phone was stolen by design: dark patterns, dopamine loops, engagement metrics built to extract your attention for profit. A generation is chronically online while their actual lives atrophy. We exist so millions of people don't reach the end of theirs having never truly been there for it.
You're not fighting alone.
Remote workers, parents, founders, night-shift nurses. People on every continent reclaiming their evenings together.
Read the stories →“First app I've used twice and not deleted out of guilt. The brain dump alone is worth it.”
“I haven't opened Instagram in bed in 47 days. No streak shaming, just a habit that finally stuck.”
Set your rhythm.
Free to download. Works tonight. No streaks, no shame, no productivity-bro nonsense.