We built the thing we kept failing to build with willpower

The prototype was a kitchen drawer

Long before there was hardware, the method was embarrassingly low-tech: put the phone in a drawer in another room and shut it. It worked far better than any app we had tried, which was annoying, because we build software for a living.

The problem was that it was all-or-nothing. A phone in a drawer is also a phone that cannot take a call from school, show a boarding pass, or pay for coffee. We kept reaching for it for a legitimate reason and then losing forty minutes to something else entirely.

The insight was about direction, not force

What the drawer got right was not that it was strict. It was that it was asymmetric: putting the phone away cost nothing, and getting it back cost a walk. Every piece of software we had tried made both directions cost the same — one tap in, one tap out — and so the tired version of us always won.

We did not need a stronger lock. We needed the key to be somewhere else.

That turned out not to be only our experience. A published experiment found that people who left their phone in a different room did measurably better on working-memory tasks than people whose phone sat face-down and switched off on the desk. We did not run that study, and we have run none of our own — but it is the closest thing we have found to a description of what the drawer was actually doing. The studies we lean on, all of them other people’s.

So we separated the two

Spark keeps the phone — all of it, maps and camera and payments and calls — and moves only the permission to be distracted. Locking stays instant and free: one tap, no key needed, no waiting, and it works with Bluetooth switched off entirely, because hesitating to lock is the real failure mode. Unlocking is the part that requires a small key you deliberately left in the other room. The app is free forever; the key is a one-time purchase and there is no subscription behind it. What that costs and what arrives.

How it started

Puneet and Akshay started building Spark in 2026, after noticing the same thing kept happening to both of them: a two-minute check of the phone mid-task that quietly ate the rest of the hour. Neither of them trusted willpower to fix it, so instead of another app with another off switch, they built a key you have to get up and walk to.

The tag became a key

Spark did not begin as a Bluetooth device. The first version was an NFC tag: you tapped it to the phone, the phone read a token, the apps unlocked. It was pleasingly physical. It also did not work on a large number of phones — a big share of budget and mid-range Android handsets ship with no NFC radio at all, and India is our first market, where mid-range Android is the phone most people are actually holding. A focus tool that only works on some phones is not a product.

Moving to Bluetooth Low Energy fixed availability, and done naively it would have broken the security model in the same step. NFC’s underrated virtue was practical rather than cryptographic: cloning a tag takes hardware and intent, whereas anything broadcasting a fixed value over radio can be copied in software in seconds. So the move came with a protocol change rather than a straight port. The static token became a challenge–response exchange — your phone issues a fresh random challenge every time and the key has to answer it — which rebuilds in software the guarantee NFC had been getting from physics.

The change also turned range from a constraint into the point. A tag has to be touched. A key can sit in another room, which is exactly where we wanted it. It cost us one thing: the key now has a battery, and a flat battery must never mean a permanently bricked phone. That is why emergency unlocks exist, and why they are deliberately capped rather than generous — enough to survive a dead key, few enough that they cannot quietly become the normal way you unlock.

What we refuse to do

We will not add streak mechanics designed to make you anxious, sell your usage data, or claim enforcement we cannot deliver. Blocking runs on your own phone through the operating system’s official APIs, and Android permits stricter enforcement than iOS does. Where a platform limits what we can block, we write that down plainly rather than burying it in a footnote and letting you find out on a bad evening. What each platform actually allows.

A focus product built on the same manipulative patterns as the apps it blocks would be a bad joke. That is a design constraint here, not a marketing line: it is the reason there is no streak to protect, no daily notification asking how your screen time is going, and no plan in which paying us more makes the blocking work better.

Who we are

The registered entity, address and GSTIN are published in full on the policy pages, because those are binding. The people behind it:

Puneet KandpalCo-Founder

Puneet builds the product and most of the code behind it, and started Spark after one too many focused mornings lost to a phone he only meant to check for thirty seconds.

Akshay VayakCo-Founder

Akshay runs the business side of Spark — sourcing, support and the parts that keep the shop honest — and is usually the person who replies when you email us.