When BlockerPlus crossed 100,000 installs, we expected to feel something like pride. Instead, what we felt was responsibility. A hundred thousand people had handed us access to some of the most private parts of their digital lives — their browsing habits, their vulnerabilities, their desire to change something about themselves. That's not a growth metric. That's a covenant.
Now, at 200,000, that feeling has only deepened. Here's what we've learned along the way.
Users of sensitive apps don't forgive easily
BlockerPlus occupies a category of app where the stakes are unusually high. People use it because they've struggled — sometimes for years — with compulsive behaviour they want to stop. Many have tried other apps before ours and been burned: apps that stopped working after an update, apps that sold their data, apps that were trivially bypassable. They arrive at BlockerPlus with a history of being let down.
This means that every bug carries more weight than it would in a productivity tool or a game. A feature that stops working for a day isn't an inconvenience — for some users, it's a relapse trigger. We learned this early from our reviews. The most negative feedback wasn't about missing features. It was about broken promises.
"The first lesson of building a sensitive-use app: never ship something you haven't tested on your own device, in your own hands, for a week."
Transparency is a competitive advantage
We made a deliberate choice early on to be radically transparent about how BlockerPlus works. Our permission request screens explain exactly why each permission is needed. Our privacy policy is written in plain language. Our blog explains the technical decisions behind the product in detail.
The payoff has been real. Our highest-rated reviews consistently mention trust. People who recommend BlockerPlus to friends say things like "it does exactly what it says." In a category where scepticism is the default, that clarity is genuinely differentiating.
Reviews are a product feedback system
We read every review — not as a monitoring exercise, but as a product development discipline. Our reviews have directly shaped the product in ways that no user research session could have. The cooldown period feature came directly from a user who wrote: "I need it to be harder to disable, not easier." The ability to whitelist specific apps came from parents managing their children's devices.
Growth and trust are in tension — until they're not
There are growth strategies available to apps in our category that we have deliberately not used. Aggressive pop-ups. Dark patterns in the cancellation flow. Misleading claims about effectiveness. All of these would likely improve short-term metrics. We believe they would also, eventually, destroy the thing that makes BlockerPlus worth using.
The 200,000 installs we have are built primarily on word of mouth. People telling other people that this app actually worked for them. That's the only kind of growth worth having in this space.
To our users: Thank you for trusting us with something difficult. We don't take that lightly, and we never will.