Private · in testing
Out Past
A phone, or a computer, that cannot be talked out of the plan. The most advanced thing I have built, and the strangest, because most of its engineering is not code.
The one idea
Every app that promises to fix a phone habit asks nicely. A timer has an ignore button. A screen-time limit has a passcode you set yourself. A focus mode is a mode, and a mode can be left. None of them can hold anyone, because none of them are allowed to: the phone belongs to you, the operating system treats you as its owner, and an app cannot cage a phone whose owner controls it.
That single sentence is the whole product. Out Past stops the person holding the phone from being the person the phone obeys. It was written down early, proved true on three platforms, and every hard part of this is the answer to it. It is not a reminder, a nudge, or a chart of how badly the week went. There is no button, no passcode, no restart, and no factory reset that brings the apps back.
Three platforms, three different fights
The three platforms fight back in three different ways, so Out Past exists in three forms.
Android: become the device owner
Device owner is a real Android mode, the one a company sets on a phone before handing it to an employee. Once an app holds it, it can suspend other apps, forbid a factory reset, forbid safe mode, forbid adding an account, and hold the screen in a kiosk the home button cannot leave. It can only be set once, over a cable, on a phone with no accounts on it. That constraint is the business: the phone is bought, provisioned, and posted, and it arrives already unable to be freed. The entire technical core is one shell script and one sequence of ADB commands that took a day to get right, most of it spent on two settings Android does not document.
iPhone: supervision, and an identity kept forever
There is no device owner on iPhone. There is supervision, what a school does to an iPad, and it takes a Mac, a wipe, and a supervision identity that must never be lost. Under it, a profile can lock the phone to a single app, filter every web request, and it cannot be removed from the phone itself. It is harder than Android in every way, it expires every ninety days because of how TestFlight works, and it was built anyway. Three separate traps each cost a day.
Mac: a lock that runs as root
On the Mac, Out Past is a focus block a normal user cannot end, enforced by a daemon the user cannot stop, with a DNS resolver of its own that a browser cannot route around. Four layers deep on adult content, permanently, with no off switch. The reason there is no off switch is the whole philosophy in one line: an off switch is a door.
Most of the engineering is not code
This is what makes it the hardest thing here. The work is a sequence of commands over a cable, a supervision identity that must never be lost, a resolver that runs as root, and four layers of filtering with no off switch. Play Protect blocks an accessibility service plus a device admin plus a sideload on most Android phones, and Apple does not allow any of this at all. That is why the delivery is a cable, not a download. Two of the hardest chapters are, in a sense, the story of routing around two app stores that were designed to prevent exactly this.
The resolver that learns
The Mac's own DNS resolver holds 222,000 domains and learns new ones by their behavior, so a fresh site that acts like the ones on the list is blocked before anyone has to add it by hand. It is layered with an enforced upstream that has no off switch, tens of thousands of adult hosts, a list of DNS-over-HTTPS endpoints, and the VPN domains that would otherwise route around all of it. Four layers, because any single one is a door.
Two products, one idea
Grow is the app the locked phone runs. A mission for the year, a plan for the week, a kill list for today, a calendar that fills its own empty slots, a journal, a library of things to watch, and a mentor, KAI, that breaks a four-month goal into sixteen weekly themes. It is positioned as a growth system, not a productivity app, and priced like a coach: the person who wants this wants it badly, and there are not many of them, and both facts point at the same price.
Focus Phone is the hardware business. Buy a phone, provision it as device owner with the lock already set, post it. The customer opens a box and takes out a phone that will not let them do the thing they bought it to stop them doing.
The whiteboard, and forever
The whiteboard is one file of six and a half thousand lines that boots a Chromebook straight into an infinite canvas. It reads handwriting into text, plays noughts and crosses against you when you draw the grid, and stores pictures as separate records so they cost nothing. A device that turns on and drops you straight into thinking, with nothing else in the way.
forever is a small site that tells one person whether another is locked in, on what, and the message they left. It is fed by Out Past, so the person on the outside always knows what is happening on the inside.
Judgment, and what was taken out
No off switch, because an off switch is a door. Everything that would let the person change their mind at midnight is the exact thing the product exists to remove. Every rule was tested on one person first, including everything he tried to do to get out.
Strict, not cruel. Several things were built, tried, and removed for being cruel rather than strict. A hard lock at ten every night was one of them. The line between a wall and a punishment is a design decision, and it was made on purpose.
Where a reason is not recorded, it says so. These projects have no version control, so the record is a written note per decision plus the comments in the code. Where neither says why, the account reads "the reason for this is not recorded" rather than guessing. Each of those is an argument for writing the reason down while you still have it.
Where it honestly stands
Out Past is in private testing, built first for one person and proven on three platforms. It is not on an app store, by design, because neither store allows what it does. There is no public product to click yet. It is here because it is the deepest systems work I have done, and the part I am proudest of is that the wall actually holds.