Why willpower keeps losing
A feed has no end. There is no last page, no natural stopping point, no moment where the thing you were doing is finished. Every other activity you do has one. That absence is deliberate and it is the entire design.
On top of that, what you get is unpredictable. Most posts are forgettable and occasionally one is genuinely good, which is the same schedule that makes slot machines work. You are not weak for losing to it. You are one person against a system that has been tested on hundreds of millions of people.
So stop trying to want it less. Change what your hand finds.
Start with the free things
Kill the notifications. Not "manage" them. Turn them off entirely for every feed app, in Android settings rather than inside each app so it survives updates. A notification is the app deciding when you use it.
Move the apps off your home screen. Into a folder, on the last page, unsorted. The point is not to hide them from a determined search. It is to break the muscle memory of the thumb landing on a familiar position.
Try greyscale. Android has it under accessibility or developer options depending on your phone. It works for some people and does nothing for others, but it costs nothing to find out which you are.
Do these three before spending money on anything. A meaningful share of people stop here and do not need the rest.
When free is not enough
If you have done the above and still find yourself twenty minutes into a feed you did not choose to open, the problem is that nothing physically stops you. Every remaining tool is some version of adding a wall.
Pause apps put a breathing screen between you and the feed. They work well for a couple of weeks, then your thumb learns where the dismiss button lives and stops reading. Timers work until the moment you edit the timer, which is always available because you set it.
Screen time limits have the same flaw in a different costume: they arrive after you are already in the feed, and dismissing them takes two taps.
The version that holds
The one structural difference that survives is making the unlock depend on something outside the moment. Not a countdown you can shorten. Something you have to actually do.
That is what Broc does on Android: the feed apps stay shut, and they open when a habit you chose is done. Read for twenty minutes, train, study, whatever you would rather the time went to. There is no snooze because there is no timer to snooze.
It is not magic and it is not unbeatable. You can uninstall it in a minute, because it is your phone. What it removes is the frictionless version of giving up, and that turns out to be most of them.
What none of this fixes
If the scrolling is doing a job, blocking it just moves the job elsewhere. People scroll to avoid a feeling, to fill silence, or because they are exhausted and it is the only thing that asks nothing of them. Block Instagram in that state and you will find Reddit, then the news, then your email.
That is worth knowing before you conclude the tool failed. The tool works on the reach. It has nothing to say about why the reach is happening, and the broader version of that question deserves more than an app.
Stop deciding in the moment. Decide once, then let the phone hold the line.
Get Broc on Google Play