TABS

The problem

People with ADHD lose focus to mental distractions — the mind drifts long before anything on the screen changes. The idea needed a product that could catch those moments and enforce a real recovery break, then get out of the way. And it had to stand on its own as a subscription business, not a demo: accounts, billing, and sync that hold up for paying users on more than one device.

The approach

This was a full product build, not a prototype. User accounts and cross-device sync so a session follows the person from phone to iPad; StoreKit subscription billing so the app charges $7 a month through the App Store; and the Bayesian residue-scoring engine at the center of it, which decides when a break is actually due.

The engine watches for the mental residue that builds up as attention wanders and scores it in the background. When the score says focus has slipped, it schedules a "boring break" — an enforced pause that resets attention before work resumes — instead of waiting for the person to notice on their own.

The result

TABS ships as a working subscription product, live in the App Store and at focustabs.org. The native SwiftUI front-end talks to a FastAPI backend; StoreKit runs the $7/mo billing; and the Bayesian engine times each enforced break so the app steps in at the right moment, across every device the person signs into.

Tech stack

More work