A small pause between impulse and browsing.
An Android app that adds a little friction before browsing and keeps your shared browser time inside daily, weekly, and monthly limits.
When you open Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera, you choose a 10, 30, or 60 minute session and wait a few seconds before it begins. The app tracks active use across all four browsers in one shared budget and shows how much time remains in your daily, weekly, and monthly budgets.
It is a personal speed bump, not an unbreakable blocker. You remain in control and can turn it off whenever you choose.
No account. No ads. No analytics. No internet permission. Everything stays on your phone.
Retro is distributed as a manually installed APK. It requires Android 10 or newer.
- Download the newest
.apkfrom the repository's Releases page. - Open the downloaded file on your phone and allow installation from that source if Android asks.
- Open Retro and follow its four setup screens.
- Enable Retro's Accessibility service when prompted. On some sideloaded Android 13+ devices, App info may first require Allow restricted settings.
Android requires you to enable the service yourself. A computer, ADB, root, VPN, account, or Usage Access permission is not required.
Retro supports these stable Android apps:
- Google Chrome (
com.android.chrome) - Mozilla Firefox (
org.mozilla.firefox) - Microsoft Edge (
com.microsoft.emmx) - Opera (
com.opera.browser)
They use one shared budget. Other browsers—including Brave, Samsung Internet, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Firefox Focus/Beta, Chrome Beta/Canary, Edge Beta, and Opera Mini—are not currently restricted.
Download the newer APK and open it. Android should offer Update. Do not uninstall the existing app first: an in-place update keeps your Retro settings, usage, and report history.
This is beta software. Android manufacturers can differ in their Accessibility and background-service behavior.
Developers can clone the repository and run ./gradlew assembleDebug. Locally
built APKs use the builder's own signing identity, so they are not guaranteed to
update an APK downloaded from this repository's Releases page.
Use it, change it, and share it under the 0BSD license. The bundled fonts remain under their own free and open license described in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.