DESIGNED AGAINST ADDICTION
Smartphones were not designed with children's nervous systems in mind.
Every notification and infinite scroll is engineered to exploit the brain's reward system. Children's still-developing brains are the most susceptible. SafetyMode is built to fight back.
WHAT PARENTS ARE UP AGAINST
1 in 3
young people show increasingly addictive social media use between ages 11 and 14, with roughly double the risk of suicidal behaviour and worse mental health.
Xiao et al., JAMA, 2025
237 per day
notifications received by the average young person, about a quarter of them during school hours.
Common Sense Media, “Constant Companion,” 2023
HOW SAFETYMODE FIGHTS ADDICTIVE DESIGN
SafetyMode attacks addiction from four angles:
When apps are off-schedule they disappear from the home screen entirely. Nothing to crave, nothing to negotiate over.
The default home screen is a list rather than a grid, reducing the colour variations and "scanning" behaviour the grid produces when looking for app notifications.
For any apps outside of their scheduled hours, all notifications are blocked. The phone remains a tools, not a demand for attention.
Content blocking interrupts endless scrolling, a pattern break that gives children the ability to disengage.
75%
Reported reduction in screentime by SafetyMode users within the first month.
