one sec

What one sec is

one sec inserts a short mandatory pause between tapping an app and the app opening. You choose the target apps - social media, games, video, dating, trading and adult content are the vendor's named cases - and what the pause consists of: 4-7-8 or box breathing, a mirror view of your own face, an emotion or intention log, a rotate-the-phone task, or a maths problem. Then a continue button appears and you go through.

It runs on iOS 15 and later, Android, macOS 14 and later, and as a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge that treats websites the same way. Re-Intervention ejects you from an app after a chosen interval; strict block sessions can bar one on a schedule. The listing states it is covered by US Patent 12,468,828 B2.

The only friction product in this corpus, and the distinction matters

Every other tool in this category removes a capability or adds a witness. Canopy decides what the network will serve. Covenant Eyes and Ever Accountable decide who sees the log. Tech Lockdown makes settings enforceably hard to reverse. one sec removes nothing and tells nobody. It taxes an action by a few seconds and lets the tax do the work.

The theory is self-nudging: you are pre-committing against your own autopilot rather than being restrained by an authority, so the pause does not provoke the reactance hard blocks reliably do. That is a real literature and one sec is a clean implementation. But the mechanism defines the ceiling exactly. Friction works on habit and fails on intent. Someone reaching for a phone out of boredom is a good candidate; someone in a compulsive spiral at 2am has already decided, and the breathing animation is a formality on the way. Sold to the second person, one sec is worse than nothing, because it looks like a solution.

The intervention library and Re-Intervention

Nine-plus intervention types is not padding, it answers the obvious failure mode: any single pause becomes automatic within a fortnight. Breathing is the default and the type the research used, but the mirror view - your own face mid-reach - and the intention prompt are the ones users describe as harder to blow past. Emotion logging is the only mechanism here producing insight rather than delay.

Re-Intervention is what separates one sec from cheaper imitators. Friction at the door does nothing about the forty minutes past the door. Set it to five minutes and the app closes on you at five minutes, and you must pass the intervention again to reopen it, turning a toll booth into a metered road. It is free on your one chosen app, which is genuinely generous.

Website coverage and the adult-content blocker

The browser extension is where one sec comes closest to the accountability category, and the part to read most carefully. It applies interruptions to websites across Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, and includes an adult-content filter the help centre describes as soft mode free and enhanced strict mode behind pro. That is a real feature and it is not a network filter. It lives in a browser, on browsers you installed it on, under an operating system that lets you install another in thirty seconds.

The honest framing is friction applied to a second surface, not protection extended to it. Nothing here covers a different browser, an in-app webview, another device on the network, or a guest profile. A household that needs pornography blocked needs a DNS or router-level filter; a person in recovery needs someone informed.

Pricing

Where one sec falls behind

On protection, categorically. There is no mode in which one sec prevents access to anything a motivated user wants. No partner-held password, no tamper-evident configuration, no uninstall alert, no report. Covenant Eyes and Ever Accountable exist because for some problems the effective ingredient is another person seeing the log, and one sec has built the opposite product. That is a boundary rather than a bug, and the failure mode is buying it for the wrong job.

On the headline research claim, which needs reading rather than repeating. The February 2023 PNAS paper, Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec by David Gruening, Frederik Riedel and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, is real, peer-reviewed, and co-authored by the app's own founder. Its design is an opt-in observational field study of 280 existing users over six weeks with no control group. Its measure is app opening attempts: 36 percent were abandoned at the intervention, falling from 43 percent in week one to roughly 32 to 34 percent by weeks three to six, alongside 37 percent fewer attempts initiated. The 57 percent on the homepage is the compound of those two effects on openings. It is not minutes, not against a control, and it describes people who chose to install a friction app and kept it. The decay to the low thirties is the most useful number in the paper.

On the wording around that number. The research page says one sec "reduces app usage by 57%" and the FAQ says the studies show a "57% reduction in app usage on average." App usage and app openings are not the same quantity, and the study measured openings. The homepage also advertises roughly two more hours of sleep per week and 3,000 years of scrolling saved weekly, neither attributed to any of the seven publications listed. Credit for publishing the papers at all; scrutiny for compressing them into marketing arithmetic.

On Android, still. A gap the vendor discloses is still a gap the buyer pays for: a product built a year later, on a more fragile interception mechanism, with a pro feature iOS-only, at the same price.

On being a Christian product, which it is not and never claims to be. one sec is a secular productivity app from a Spanish-registered, German-founded studio, with no scripture, prayer or devotional content in it. It appears in this category because the adult-content blocker and the habit-interruption mechanism overlap with what people here want, not because it was built for them.

one sec vs. Clearspace vs. Covenant Eyes vs. Tech Lockdown

one sec and Clearspace are the two friction products, and the choice is mostly taste. Both interpose a pause before a chosen app opens; both let you through. one sec is older, larger by ratings volume, deeper in intervention variety, further along on Android, and the only one of the pair with a peer-reviewed paper and a lifetime purchase. Clearspace leans harder on session budgeting.

Against Covenant Eyes it is not a comparison at all, and that is worth saying bluntly. Covenant Eyes exists to put a report of your activity in front of a named ally. one sec exists to make you breathe. If the problem is pornography with a relapse history, one sec is a supplement at best and a decoy at worst, because it produces the feeling of having installed something.

Tech Lockdown is the third mechanism: enforced configuration you cannot casually undo, with DNS filtering and profile locks that make reversal a deliberate multi-step act. That is the right tool when the failure is a 2am decision rather than a daytime reflex, and the tool one sec is furthest from. A sensible stack is Tech Lockdown for what the device may reach, Covenant Eyes for who knows, and one sec for the reflex - the cheapest layer, and the one to add last.

Alternatives to one sec

Clearspace★ 4.7The other friction app - same pause-before-you-open mechanism with more emphasis on session budgets, but no peer-reviewed paper.→Covenant Eyes★ 4.3Accountability rather than friction: screenshot-based activity reports sent to a named ally. The right tool when someone else needs to see the log.→Tech Lockdown★ 4.3Enforced configuration and DNS filtering built to be genuinely hard to reverse. The opposite bet from one sec, and the better one for late-night intent.→Ever Accountable★ 4.1Partner-reporting accountability across devices with no filtering. Pair it with one sec for a witness and a speed bump; do not treat one as the other.→Canopy★ 3.7An actual content filter with real-time image screening, for households that need pornography blocked rather than delayed inside one browser.→

More Accountability & Filtering Apps

Relay★ 4.9A therapist-designed group programme rather than a filter or a monitor - private same-gender accountability groups, interactive video lessons and live Zoom calls, with nothing anywhere in it that blocks a website.→The Freedom Fight★ 4.8Not a filter and not a monitor, but a staged discipleship curriculum that treats compulsive porn use as a formation problem rather than a network problem - and asks for seven months to prove it.→ClearSpace★ 4.7ClearSpace puts a timed breath, a note to yourself, or camera-counted push-ups between your thumb and Instagram, then pulls you out when your session expires - and every gate ends in a door you are allowed to walk through.→LeadMeNot★ 4.7A cross-platform blocker whose distinguishing idea is that switching it off needs somebody else to say yes - priced sensibly, well reviewed by a small number of people, and documented far too thinly.→LivingRoom for Families★ 4.6A parental monitoring app that gates internet access behind continuous screen recording, then has an AI look at what appears - the most invasive approach in this category, and the most complete. Whether that is right for your household is the entire decision.→Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for Families★ 4.5Two numbers in a router and every device on the network stops resolving malware and adult-content domains, free, with no account and no device limit. The catch is everything DNS cannot see - and Cloudflare's own developer documentation is where you find it.→