AINEWS
HyperSleep Wants to Lock Your Social Apps Until You Actually Sleep
A new Android app flips the screen time problem: instead of timers you can ignore, it keeps apps locked until multi sensor detection verifies you actually slept.
A new Android app flips the screen time problem: instead of timers you can ignore, it keeps apps locked until multi sensor detection verifies you actually slept.
Every screen-time app fails for the same reason: it asks you to decide at 1am whether to stop scrolling. By then, willpower is gone.
HyperSleep, launching today on Android, takes a different approach. Instead of timers you can dismiss or ignore limits you can override, it keeps your social apps locked until a combination of phone sensors verifies you've actually slept.
The maker, Roddy, describes a familiar spiral: setting a sleep limit, ignoring it at midnight, then realizing at 2am that you've been on Instagram for 40 minutes. "I'd 'decide' to sleep and somehow be 40 minutes into Instagram at 2am," he writes on Product Hunt.
The core issue is structural. Most screen-time tools demand active resistance at the exact moment resistance is hardest. You set a boundary during the day, then override it when you're tired and dopamine-hungry.
HyperSleep inverts the model. Your chosen apps stay locked until the phone's sensors confirm sleep—using a combination of the Sleep API, accelerometer data, ambient light readings, and usage patterns. The system targets roughly 70% confidence over 20 or more continuous minutes of sleep signals.
The key framing: you don't earn screen time by waiting out a timer. You earn it by sleeping.
Key features:
The ~70% confidence threshold over 20 continuous minutes is central to the product's claim but is not independently validated. This is a confidence level the maker describes, not a clinical or third-party metric. Whether that threshold is sufficient for users to trust the system—and whether it produces the intended behavioral shift—remains the core open question.
The app also raises the standard autonomy question: an app that controls access to other apps based on sensor input is, by design, hard to game. Whether that difficulty is a feature or a liability depends on whether users feel in control or surveilled.
At launch, HyperSleep has six followers on Product Hunt and appears to be a solo or small-team effort. Any characterization of traction, market position, or user adoption would be premature. The Android-only constraint and on-device-only architecture are real limits: iOS users have no option, and the no-cloud approach means no cross-device sync, which may matter for users who switch between devices.
HyperSleep's thesis is that screen-time apps fail because they treat willpower as reliable. By making phone access contingent on verified sleep, it removes the moment of weakness from the equation.
Whether it works depends on two separate questions: whether the detection is accurate enough to be fair, and whether users will accept an app that can lock them out based on what it thinks it knows about their night.
HyperSleep is available for Android with a 5-day free trial.