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SWILENZIO
Now in Beta · TestFlight

Build the habit
of going offline.

Swilenzio is an iOS app that helps you spend less time on your phone — not through willpower, but through behavioural science. Block your distraction apps, track your time away, and watch the habit take shape.

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Requires iOS 17+ on iPhone
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Android not yet available
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What it does

Every feature earns its place.

Swilenzio is built around a single loop: go offline, notice how it feels, come back with data. Everything else serves that loop.

🔒

Nemesis app blocking

Pick the apps that pull you in most. When a session starts, they're blocked via iOS Screen Time — no workarounds, no notifications leaking through.

📍

Live Activity on lock screen

Your session timer stays visible on the lock screen throughout. Encouragements appear at milestones. No need to unlock your phone to check in.

🌅

Morning Shield

Automatically blocks your nemesis apps for a configurable window after you wake up. Integrates with HealthKit sleep data for precision timing.

🌙

Bedtime flow

A pre-bedtime wind-down period, overnight blocking, and a fresh morning shield — all in one automated flow you configure once.

📊

Mood check-ins

Rate focus, mood, energy, and anxiety before and after each session. Over time, the data shows exactly how offline time affects how you feel.

🏅

Badges & streaks

35+ badges mark meaningful milestones — first long session, week-long streaks, consistent morning shields. Progress you can actually point to.

📋

Daily report

Each morning, a summary of the previous day: offline time, sessions, shield attempts, mood delta, and how you tracked against your goal.

🔔

Personalised nudges

Notifications reference your specific nemesis app by name. News addicts get a headline at 90 minutes — then the phone stays down.

The science

Not willpower.
Habit architecture.

Swilenzio draws on two bodies of behavioural science research. The first is habit formation theory — specifically the role of cue-routine-reward loops in building durable behaviour change. The second is digital wellbeing research on screen time reduction, which consistently shows that abrupt restriction fails where gradual reduction with positive reinforcement succeeds. The app adapts its blocking intensity and encouragement cadence to your mood scores and historical usage patterns.

Habit formation and the role of reinforcement in behaviour change
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H. & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
Gradual reduction vs. abrupt restriction in screen time intervention
Wilcockson, T., Osborne, A. & Ellis, D. (2019). Digital detox: The effect of smartphone abstinence on mood, anxiety, and craving. Addictive Behaviors, 99.
Positive reinforcement and digital habit loops
Fogg, B.J. (2019). Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything. Eamon Dolan Books. — Applied to the session reward and badge structure.
Morning smartphone use and cortisol / cognitive load
Thomée, S. (2018). Mobile phone use and mental health. Current Psychiatry Reports, 20(73). — Basis for the Morning Shield feature design.
Mood-adaptive intervention and engagement rates
Research programme context: ETH Zurich & Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group — principles informing adaptive feedback timing in Swilenzio.
Coming next

What we're building toward.

The core loop is live and in testing. These features are confirmed for future builds.

🎵

Spotify focus mode

Auto-play a focus playlist the moment a session starts.

👫

Couple mode

Shared offline history and streaks for two people building the habit together.

👨‍👩‍👧

Family plan

Individual streaks and shared goals across a household.

🏃

Strava integration

Log offline sessions alongside your training — because the two go together.

⌚

Apple Watch

Watch face complication, haptic nudges, and richer HealthKit integration.

🏢

Corporate wellness

Team challenges, leaderboards, and manager dashboards for organisations.

🤖

AI mood analysis

Verbal interpretation of your mood graph patterns with personalised suggestions.

🎵

Apple Music

Focus and wind-down playlists tied to session state and time of day.

From the journal

Thinking out loud.

Notes on building Swilenzio, the research behind it, and what we're learning from testers.

Behaviour change

Why most screen time apps fail — and what we did differently

Cold turkey doesn't work. Here's what the research says about gradual reduction, and how we built that insight into the core loop.

Coming soon 5 min read
Product

Building Morning Shield: the hardest feature to get right

The first hour after waking is the highest-leverage moment of the day. We spent three builds getting Morning Shield to feel frictionless.

Coming soon 7 min read
Beta insights

What our first 12 testers taught us about going offline

From unexpected use cases to bugs we never anticipated — a candid look at what the first TestFlight build revealed.

Coming soon 6 min read

More posts on the way as we build in public.

Get in touch

Contact.

Questions, feedback, press inquiries, or partnership ideas — we'd like to hear from you.

Contact form coming soon.
In the meantime, reach us at hello@swilenzio.ch

Try it while it's in beta.

Free to join. Up to 200 testers. iOS 17+ required.
Android support is not available at this time.

testflight.apple.com/join/AtwqXZzR