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.

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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:

1. Run the setup SQL in the comment block in supabase.js (profiles, screen time, friendships, challenges).
2. 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.
3. 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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