Drift
Work for your scroll. Drift is an iOS app that blocks the apps you choose
until you earn screen time by doing real things: a workout, a chapter, a chore.
You prove it with a photo or a short video, and an AI check approves it before
the time is credited.
· Website
What it does
- Earned screen time. Finishing a task adds minutes to your balance. While
the balance is empty, the apps you picked stay behind a Screen Time shield.
- Proof, not honour. Photo and video proof are judged server-side. A
task-blind pass describes what's in the frame, then a text-only pass judges
that description against the task, so the model can't "find" push-ups in a
picture of a living room just because it was told to look for them.
- Families. Parents assign tasks, approve or reject proof, and set app
policies on a child's device.
- Lockbox. Put the phone in an AR box and leave it there. Lift it and a
countdown starts, driven by on-device motion detection.
- Sleep guard. Tap an NFC tag in another room before bed; in the morning
Drift checks from motion history that the phone actually stayed there.
- Widgets, Live Activities and Siri intents, plus 20 languages.
Architecture
┌────────────────────────────────┐ ┌────────────────────────────────────┐
│iOS app (Expo / React Native) │ │Supabase │
│ Drift.jsx shell, JS/JSX │──JWT──▶│ Edge Functions (Deno/TS) │
│ Native modules (Swift): │ │ verify-task, evaluate-task │
│ ScreenTime, Lockbox, │ │ -> OpenAI (server-side only) │
│ SleepGuard │ │ revenuecat-webhook <- RevenueCat │
└────────────────────────────────┘ │ family + push functions │
│ Postgres + RLS │
┌────────────────────────────────┐ │ is_pro(uuid): one entitlement │
│Extensions (App Group) │ │ definition for every caller │
│ DriftMonitor: DeviceActivity │ └────────────────────────────────────┘
│ DriftShield: shield UI │
│ DriftWidgets │
└────────────────────────────────┘
A few decisions worth calling out:
- The server is the only judge. Every AI call and every subscription check
happens in an edge function. The client bundle holds no OpenAI key, and any
gating in the UI is cosmetic.
- One definition of "Pro". Entitlement comes from a live subscription, a
redeemed code, a beta unlock, or a child seat under a paying parent. All of
them are ORed in a single SQL function,
is_pro(), which every edge
function calls instead of re-implementing the check.
- The webhook owns subscription state. Only
revenuecat-webhook (which
authenticates every request) may write a subscription's active/expiry
fields; a database trigger rejects writes from anywhere else.
- Blocking survives the app being killed.
DriftMonitor is a
DeviceActivityMonitor extension that iOS wakes on its own schedule, so the
shield goes up even if Drift is force-quit or the phone is offline.
- Soft delete everywhere. A trigger refuses hard deletes on user data. The
only exception is erasure (account deletion, COPPA child deletion,
retention purge), which goes through dedicated functions that switch the
guard off for their own transaction.
- Battery-aware sensing. Motion thresholds are evaluated in Swift, and
only state transitions cross the bridge into JavaScript, so a still phone
generates no traffic.
Repository layout
| Path | What's there |
|---|
App.js, Drift.jsx, *.jsx | App shell, screens and modals |
screenTime.js, blockedApps.js | JS side of the Screen Time bridge |
ios/Drift/ | Native modules (Screen Time, Lockbox AR, Sleep Guard) |
ios/DriftMonitor, ios/DriftShield, ios/DriftWidgets | App extensions |
supabase/functions/ | Edge functions |
supabase/admin/ | Annotated schema history (schema_v*.sql): explains why |
supabase/migrations/ | The migrations as applied |
i18n/ | Translation sources (i18n/src/*.tsv) and the build that emits JS, Swift and InfoPlist strings |
dashboard/ | Internal metrics page (Vercel) |
docs/ | Public website, served by GitHub Pages |
Building it
You'll need a Mac with Xcode, Node, CocoaPods and your own Supabase project.
Screen Time features (shields, the app picker, the monitor extension) only work
on a real iPhone, not in the simulator or Expo Go.
npm install --legacy-peer-deps
cd ios && pod install && cd ..
cp .env.example .env # Google OAuth client IDs
npx expo start --dev-client
Point SUPABASE_URL / SUPABASE_ANON in supabase.js at your own project.
Then build the Drift scheme from ios/Drift.xcworkspace in Xcode. On Xcode
27, npx expo run:ios can't find the simulator; build with xcodebuild
instead (see CLAUDE.md for the exact command).
The backend runs on Supabase. supabase/migrations/ only starts in August
2026 and assumes the tables created before it, so a fresh project needs the
base schema first:
- Run the setup SQL in the comment block in
supabase.js (profiles,
screen time, friendships, challenges).
- Run
supabase/admin/schema_v*.sql in version order, plus the unnumbered
table files (push_tokens.sql, analytics_events.sql). They are written
to be safe to re-run.
- Apply
supabase/migrations/ with supabase db push.
Bootstrapping a brand-new project from scratch this way hasn't been tested
end to end, so expect to fix up an ordering issue or two.
Then deploy the functions and set OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_MODEL (must be
vision-capable) and REVENUECAT_WEBHOOK_SECRET as function secrets.
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