Product and technical direction of Trêve, a native iOS app for voluntary disconnection at cultural events: Apple Screen Time APIs, Supabase, TestFlight, first pilot in April.
View the platform (opens in a new tab)Trêve is a native iOS app built for a narrow practice: voluntarily cutting off your phone for the duration of a concert, a party, an opening. Not to detox from digital life in general — to give a cultural moment back its full presence. The product is built on Apple's Screen Time frameworks (FamilyControls, ManagedSettings, DeviceActivity) to lock device usage for the length of an event, with a Supabase backend and TestFlight distribution. A first real-world pilot took place in April 2026 at a Paris techno party (~350 people). *Public context (not attributed to PMF)*: Apple opened the Screen Time APIs to third-party developers starting with iOS 15 (Family Controls framework, WWDC 2021), letting third-party apps restrict app access with user consent — a technical surface that remains largely unused outside of parental control.
Build a product that confronts a simple paradox: using an app to stop using your phone. The product only works if it is more discreet than the gesture it replaces — the friction has to live in the intent, not in the interface. On the technical side, the Screen Time APIs are strict, poorly documented outside parental-control use cases, and force the experience to be designed in the margins of what Apple allows. On positioning, the trap was the "digital detox" framing: Trêve is not a cure, it is a tool for a cultural scene.
Trêve does not try to fix the general relationship with phones — it is a product with a narrow, assumed opinion: there are cultural moments where the screen damages the experience, and a simple tool is better than a moral debate. The April pilot validated the hypothesis under real conditions: at a 350-person event, the app played its role, and the topic was not the app — which is exactly what it is asked to do.