Guides › Choosing an app
Apps that make you pause before opening Instagram or TikTok
You don't want the app gone. You want a second between the impulse and the feed, long enough to ask whether you meant to open it. Four apps do that, in three different ways.
We make Kiri, one of the four.
Short answer: for a breath every time you open the app, use one sec, or ScreenZen if you want it free. For a pause only once you've used up a daily time, use Kiri. To make the icons themselves harder to tap, minimalist phone.
Three kinds of pause
Before the app opens
one sec covers the screen with a breathing exercise each time you open a chosen app, then asks whether you still want to go in. ScreenZen makes you wait a few seconds, and can make the wait longer each time you come back. Both catch the reflex: the thumb that opened Instagram before you'd decided anything.
The cost is that the pause is there every time, including when you opened the app for a reason.
After your time is up
Kiri works the other way round. You give Instagram a daily time, say fifteen minutes, and for those minutes nothing interrupts you. When they're gone, mist covers the screen. You wipe it away with your finger, take one breath, and choose: done, or two more minutes.
The cost is the reverse of one sec's: Kiri does nothing about the first tap. It suits people whose trouble is staying, more than opening.
Before you even see the icon
minimalist phone replaces your home screen with a plain list of names and adds a wait before the apps you choose. There's no red badge and no coloured icon to pull at you.
Side by side
| App | What it does | Price | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| one sec | Makes you take a breath before a chosen app opens, then asks whether you still want it. | Free for one app. Pro $6.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once | iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, and extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge |
| ScreenZen | Adds a wait before an app opens, which can grow each time, plus daily limits and a limit on opens. | Free, with optional tips | iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows |
| minimalist phone | Replaces your home screen with a plain list of app names, and adds a wait before chosen apps open. | Subscription or lifetime. The price varies, so check the store | Android, iPhone |
| Kiri | Covers the app with mist when its daily time is up. You wipe it away and take a breath. | Free for one app. Pro $7.99 once | iPhone, Android, Mac |
Prices are US prices, checked in November 2026. They change; each app's own site has the current one.
Does a pause work?
There's one good study. Researchers followed 280 people using one sec for six weeks and published the results in PNAS in 2023. After the pause, people closed the app instead of continuing on 36% of attempts, and over the six weeks they tried to open those apps 37% less often. One of the three authors is one sec's developer. Read the paper.
That study measured a pause before opening. Nobody has published the same for a pause after a time limit, including us. So we don't claim that result for Kiri. Our reasoning is simpler: nothing in Kiri is locked, so there is nothing to switch off on a bad day.
A note on iPhone
iPhone apps can't draw over other apps, so each of these works a little differently there than on Android. On iPhone, Kiri's mist arrives as a Screen Time shield over the app, and you wipe and breathe inside Kiri. The hourglass hanging over the app is on Android and Mac. Here's exactly what Kiri does on each device.