Space, made by Mobifolio (formerly branded Break Free), leans into coaching rather than enforcement: an 8-day guided course on phone/life balance, social sharing of your progress with friends and family, and goal-setting against your own usage numbers. It's a genuinely different kind of product from a blocker, and worth describing on its own terms rather than as a weaker version of one, since it was never really trying to be a hard lock in the first place. The app has also been recognised by Google Play as an "Essential App" in its category, which speaks to a level of polish and thoughtfulness beyond a simple usage counter. Mobifolio has also kept the app updated for newer Apple hardware, including Apple Silicon Macs and Vision Pro, suggesting an active, ongoing commitment to the product rather than something left to coast on its original design.
What Space actually does
Space tracks your screen time and unlock counts against goals you set, nudging you with reminders, screen dimming and notification controls rather than hard-blocking apps by default. Its most distinctive feature is an 8-day guided course aimed at building a healthier phone/life balance, plus the option to share your progress with friends and family for informal accountability, turning what might otherwise be a private struggle into something you can actually talk about with people who know you. The app also tracks unlock frequency specifically, not just total time, on the theory that how often you reach for your phone matters as much as how long each individual check lasts. Its screen-dimming and notification-control features also work quietly in the background without requiring an active session, giving a lighter-touch layer of friction even for someone who never opens the app itself on a given day.
Where Space is honestly the better pick
If what you actually want is structured coaching — a guided programme that walks you through building better habits over more than a week, not just a single feature toggled on — Space's 8-day course is doing something genuinely more ambitious than a blocker alone. Sharing progress with people who know you, rather than strangers or a leaderboard, is also a real and different kind of social accountability worth crediting, and for many people that's a more comfortable, sustainable form of accountability than a public score. That coaching-first orientation also means Space is a more forgiving app to fall short with — missing a goal doesn't break an enforced lock, it just becomes data for the next day's nudges and the next stage of the course.
| Feature | Space | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | iOS, Android, Mac (Apple Silicon), Apple Vision | iOS & Android (in development) |
| Core mechanism | Usage tracking, goal-setting and soft nudges; an 8-day guided coaching course | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Blocks the flagged app by default? | No confirmed strict/lock mode found in available sources — primarily a tracking and nudging tool | Yes |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | Free base app; in-app purchases from $1.99 up to a $3.99 one-time "Pro" tier | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
Space's design bet is that awareness and structured coaching, not enforcement, are what actually change behaviour over time — show someone their numbers, walk them through a programme, let them share progress with people who care, and the habit shifts on its own without needing to be forced. Mr. Grummel's bet is narrower and more immediate: stop the specific action, right now, with a real cost attached, rather than trusting that better information alone will eventually change what you do in the heat of the moment. One is a longer-term coaching relationship; the other is a repeated, in-the-moment interruption, and it's worth being honest about which of those two things has actually worked for you in the past before picking one over the other. It's also worth noting that these two approaches aren't mutually exclusive over time — someone might reasonably start with Space's coaching to understand their own patterns, then move to something stricter once they know exactly which moments actually need real friction.
Who should pick which
If you want a structured programme and the option to share your progress with people who know you, Space's coaching-first approach is doing something Mr. Grummel doesn't attempt, and the 8-day course in particular is worth trying on its own merits even alongside a stricter tool. If awareness alone hasn't been enough, and what you actually need is something that gets in the way in the moment rather than something that reports on it afterward, that's the gap Mr. Grummel's quiz-gate is built to close. It's also worth trying Space's free tier for a week purely as a diagnostic tool, since even without ever moving to a stricter blocker, simply seeing accurate unlock-frequency numbers can be genuinely eye-opening on its own.