Good apps have a place to stop

Published 30 September 2026 · Updated 6 October 2026

You open an app for one thing. Twenty minutes later you have forgotten what it was, and you feel a little worse for it.

That feeling is often by design. A 2023 review of 43 studies lists the patterns behind it, among them infinite scroll and autoplay. They often lead people, it says, to “lose track of their goals, lose their sense of time and control, and later feel regret”. Of autoplay it says: “There is never a point for the user to stop and reflect.”¹

Put the stop back, and people use it

In a 2023 study, 280 people added a few seconds of breathing before opening the apps they had picked, mostly social media. More than a third of the time, they closed the app instead. Over six weeks, they also tried to open those apps less often. There was no comparison group, people chose to install the app, and one of the authors made it.²

A limit you set yourself works too. In a randomised experiment with about 2,000 American adults, one group could set daily limits on their social apps. With no reward for doing so, 78% of them set limits and kept them. Their use fell by 22 minutes a day.³

People want a place to stop

In one study, YouTube users called the end of a playlist a “good place to stop” and its recommendations “endless”.⁴ Instagram built a stop in 2018: a “You’re All Caught Up” message once you have seen every post from the last two days.⁵ And in 2025 the European Commission recommended that platforms used by minors add “friction that slows down content display, posting and user interaction”.⁶

Try this

A feed asks you to bring the stop yourself: willpower, a timer, an app that makes you breathe first. A letter brings its own.

So give the people you care about something with the stop built in. A group letter arrives on a set day and ends on its last page. You do not have to supply the stop: it is part of the design.

We make one of them, DearAll, and it is marked as ours. Its trade-off is the one this article is about: one edition a month, by design.

Sources

Alberto Monge Roffarello, Kai Lukoff and Luigi De Russis, "Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces", CHI 2023, ACM, 1-19, doi:10.1145/3544548.3580729. Accepted manuscript read from the Politecnico di Torino repository. A review of 43 papers that names eleven attention-capturing patterns, among them infinite scroll, pull-to-refresh and autoplay; the definition is on p. 5 and the autoplay description in Table 4 (p. 9). A review, not an experiment. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580729
David J. Grüning, Frederik Riedel and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, "Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120(8), 2023, e2213114120, doi:10.1073/pnas.2213114120 (open access; full text read on Europe PMC, PMC9974409). A six-week field study of the app's own users: 719 started and 280 finished, with no control group. Opening attempts were dismissed 36% of the time, attempts fell by 37% and actual openings by 57%. A separate preregistered online experiment with 500 people found that the option to dismiss mattered most and that a reflection message alone was not effective. One author created the app, as the paper discloses. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213114120
Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow and Lena Song, "Digital Addiction", American Economic Review 112(7), 2022, 2424-2463, doi:10.1257/aer.20210867. The March 2022 accepted manuscript was read (web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow); quotes are from that version. A randomised experiment with about 2,000 American adults with Android phones, recruited through Facebook and Instagram ads early in the pandemic and not representative of US adults. With limits available, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and browser use fell by 22 minutes a day (16%) over 12 weeks. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20210867
Kai Lukoff, Ulrik Lyngs, Himanshu Zade, J. Vera Liao, James Choi, Kaiyue Fan, Sean A. Munson and Alexis Hiniker, "How the Design of YouTube Influences User Sense of Agency", CHI 2021, ACM, 1-17, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445467. Open copy: arxiv.org/abs/2101.11778. A survey of 120 US YouTube users and 13 co-design sessions; the playlist quotes are on p. 7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445467
Instagram, "Introducing 'You're All Caught Up' in Feed", 2 July 2018. Company statement. https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-youre-all-caught-up-in-feed
European Commission, "Guidelines on measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors online, pursuant to Article 28(4) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065", Official Journal C/2025/5519, 10 October 2025, paragraph 57(b). Guidance for platforms used by minors, not binding law. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/118226