Crash Cards

Pay for your screen time in flashcards.

An iOS app that puts your own flashcards between you and the apps you keep opening. Pick the apps to block, and the system block screen replaces them. To get one back, answer a few questions correctly — then it unlocks for a set number of minutes and re-locks on its own.

It isn't a parental control. You choose what to block, you set the price, and the only person it's enforced against is you.

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How it works

Blocking is Apple's Screen Time (Family Controls), so it holds at the system level rather than inside the app — a blocked app shows a shield wherever you open it from.

1. Study tab — pick your sets, then Flashcards (tap to flip, swipe or step through) or Quiz (graded, scored).
2. Focus tab — choose the apps to block, turn blocking on, or schedule the hours it should run. Also where you pick which sets the gate may ask from.
3. Open a blocked app — the shield appears with an Answer button.
4. Answer — get enough right and the app opens for your grace window. A background extension re-applies the shield when the window expires, with Crash Cards closed.

Quiz mode scores a run as chips × mult, in the spirit of the card games it borrows its look from: right answers are worth more when they're quick, a streak multiplies them, and a miss takes the whole multiplier.

Your cards are just files

A deck is a Markdown file. Nothing is locked in an app database, and the app never edits your files — it reads them and reports what it couldn't parse.

# Deck Title

Front of card :: Back of card

Which planet is closest to the Sun?
- [ ] Venus
- [x] Mercury
- [ ] Mars
- [ ] Earth

Which planet spins backwards compared to the rest?
- [x] Venus

Three kinds of card: :: for a two-sided flip card, a checklist with exactly one [x] for multiple choice, and a checklist where every option is [x] for an answer you type — each line being a spelling that counts. Typed answers are forgiving about case, punctuation, a leading article and accents, but never about the actual word.

You can keep sets inside the app or attach a folder you already own (an Obsidian vault, say). A deck file can be .md, .markdown, .txt or .text for the syntax above, or a .csv or .tsv spreadsheet export.

Two starter decks ship with the app so there's something to study on first launch.

Privacy

No accounts, no server, no analytics, no tracking. Your Screen Time selection stays on the device in an App Group; your cards stay in your files. The app makes no network requests at all — asking a chatbot to explain a card opens that chatbot, it doesn't call an API.