I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less

About I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less

Island is a screen time app for iPhone and Android. Set time limits, grow crops, and watch your island thrive!

In the maker’s words

Hi HN, Ethan and I were in the January batch of this year (YC W26) and after a lot of pivots in the B2B SaaS space we felt pretty burnt out. We were both pretty good software engineers (if I may say so myself) but with Claude/Codex being so good at coding, the joy of programming was gone. Being able to see our ideas come to life instantly was awesome but the act of writing code - poof! At most of the companies I worked at, I didn't really care about the products themselves but I got a lot of joy out the work anyway because the act of breaking down problems and architecting solutions was so fun. With that aspect taken out, I began to seek joy in the products themselves and unfortunately that was not to be found in B2B SaaS. Eventually we decided to just quit the space, re-focus on what mattered to us and pivot to consumer. I had written a sudoku app back in University which was fairly suc…

Where people found it

• Hacker NewsShow HN: I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less7 points4 comments5 days ago
• Hacker NewsHow we use dopamine to get you to spend less time on your phone3 points1 comments12 days ago
• Hacker NewsThe Inverse of Ensloppification?3 points0 comments2026-08-29