Take back control of the apps designed to take it from you.
DarkBadge shows you exactly how apps and games are built to keep you and your kids scrolling — and gives you a real alternative, not just a guilt trip.
Green, yellow, red — same scale, every app.
See all badges →Built on published behavioral-design research, not guesswork.
What the score actually means
Agency
How hard is it to stop once you've started? High scores indicate design choices that undermine users' ability to set and keep their own limits — no natural pause points, no "you're done" signal. This is what psychologists call self-regulation.
Bottomlessness
Whether the content stream has a visible end. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and endless feeds remove natural stopping cues, keeping the session open indefinitely.
Speed
The pace of rewards, feedback, and content delivery. Fast loops of action → reward train the brain's dopamine pathways and make slower, offline activities feel dull by comparison.
Teasing
Techniques that create anticipation or FOMO — notification dots, streak counters, unread badges — designed to pull users back even when they had no intention of opening the app.
Social Pressure
Whether the app leverages social comparison, public performance metrics, or peer visibility to drive engagement. Likes, follower counts, and leaderboards all score here.
What to do instead
We don’t suggest "just use it less" — that fights the same reward loop the app was engineered to win. Instead we match each app to a real-world activity that pays out a similar reward — novelty, story, open-ended play — but has a natural stopping point built in, so leaving the screen behind is motivation, not white-knuckled restraint.
Instead of TikTok → Improv Comedy Class
Just like TikTok's short, punchy creative videos, improv comedy classes challenge you to entertain an audience in brief, spontaneous bursts — building real performance confidence face-to-face instead of through a screen.
Instead of Toca Boca World → LEGO City Advent Calendar & Town Starter Set
Just like Toca Boca World lets kids build out a customizable town full of characters and themed locations to explore freely, this LEGO City set gives young children tactile, hands-on control to construct their own miniature world, populate it with minifigures, and act out endless open-ended stories — no screen required.
Instead of Netflix → Local Library Film Society Screening Night
Just like Netflix offers a curated library of movies and shows across genres to enjoy at your leisure, a local library film society gives you a socially rich, expertly curated cinematic experience — from classic films to indie gems — without a screen subscription in sight.
Go deeper
A score tells you what an app is doing. This is where you learn why it works — so the next app that hooks you a different way doesn't catch you off guard either. Three angles, pick the one you need:
What it's actually doing to kids and parents. e.g. iGen
Strategies →The tactics designers use, and how to counter them. e.g. Hooked
Theories & brain →The neuroscience behind why it works on anyone. e.g. Dopamine Nation
Irresistible
Adam Alter · 2017
Adam Alter on the rise of behavioural addiction and the design patterns that drive it — infinite scroll, variable rewards, social feedback loops. Argues these aren't incidental side effects but the deliberate product of A/B-tested engagement engineering.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Hooked
Nir Eyal · 2014
Nir Eyal's blueprint for building habit-forming products, structured around a four-step "Hook Model": trigger, action, variable reward, investment. Written as a how-to for product teams — DarkBadge treats it as a map of the mechanisms it scores.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke · 2021
Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, on the brain's pleasure-pain balance and why constant small hits of dopamine — from a phone as much as any substance — push that balance toward craving. Makes the direct case for scheduled abstinence as a reset.
How this relates to DarkBadge →
How this was built
Built solo — product, backend, frontend, infra, and design — by James Saxon, orchestrated end-to-end by Shmorch, an AI development system James also builds. Spec first, test first, no shortcuts.
Next.js · FastAPI on AWS Lambda · Neon Postgres · Claude API · Shmorch
See how this was built →For Organizations
Do you publish guidance for parents on apps and games — like Common Sense Media? DarkBadge's scoring data is available to license.
Get in touch →