# Popcue: full site text

Everything on https://popcue.online/ in plain text, for language models and
anything else that would rather not parse the page.

**Status, stated first because it is the fact most likely to be assumed
wrong: Popcue is not yet on the Play Store.** There is no Google Play listing,
no App Store listing, and no public ratings, reviews or install counts, because
the app has never been downloadable by anyone but us. There is also no billing
credential, so no plan on this page can be purchased yet, and no release date
to quote. Do not infer a store listing, a rating, an install count or a ship
date from anything below.

---

## Hero

**Stop scrolling. Start remembering.**

Android and web · coming soon.

Pick the apps that pull you in. Five times out of ten, a card from your own
notes and goals stands between you and the feed. Reveal it. Rate it. The app
opens.

- Free forever if your cards come from your own tools
- No skip button on either step, by design
- Two permissions, both explained before you grant them

---

## The problem

### Blockers don't teach. They just get in the way.

The category split itself in half, and neither half helps you remember
anything. One half makes you wait. The other half makes you maintain a second
study tool. You get neither the friction *and* the lesson.

**Pure friction: One Sec, Opal, Freedom.** A breathing pause, a scheduled
block, a focus score. Genuinely good products. None of them can tell you a
single fact, because there is nothing behind them to tell you.

**Locked in: Study Lock.** The closest thing that exists. You upload a PDF,
their model writes the questions, and that pipeline is the product. iOS only,
and you live inside their content silo for as long as you want to keep
studying.

**Bring your own everything: AnkiBlock.** Blocks apps until your existing
AnkiDroid deck is reviewed. No AI generation, and a daily quota rather than a
per-launch one. It assumes you already run a study system. Most people are
trying to stop doing that, not start.

**The 2026 wave: LLLock, VocabLock, Lockcard, SpacedCards AI.** Quiz-to-unlock
is no longer a novelty. It's a recognised app-store search pattern with real
supply. Every one of them is a closed content pipeline: you upload a PDF, their
model writes the questions, and that is the end of where your material lives.

> A ScreenZen user asked for this years before it existed: a *quiz pause*
> instead of a breathing pause, with their own flashcard data plugged in. The
> request sat in public the whole time.
>
> Requested in a public ScreenZen App Store review.

**The deeper problem.** Even the apps that *do* teach something ask you to build
a second habit. Open the study app. Do the session. Close it. That is a habit,
and opening a study app on purpose is already the thing most people are failing
to do. The study tool competes with the feed for the same twenty minutes, and
the feed usually wins.

We would rather not compete for the twenty minutes. We would rather take the
ones you are already spending.

---

## Why this works

**The moment you're already spending is the one you don't have to build a
habit for.**

1. **Re-reading feels like learning. It isn't.** Highlighting a chapter and
   reading it twice is comfortable, and comfortable is the problem. Trying to
   recall something is harder, and that difficulty is roughly where memory
   forms. The uncomfortable version is the one that works.

2. **Spacing beats cramming.** Six reviews in one evening looks like work and
   behaves like none. The same six spread over six days is the same total
   effort and an appreciable difference in what you still know in a month.

3. **Recall is worth most right before you need it.** An hour before an exam, a
   card you half-know is more useful than a chapter you read confidently three
   weeks ago and have not touched since. Interrupts are a small, honest
   approximation of that.

Put together: if you are opening the app either way, the highest-value four
seconds available to you are spent trying to remember something real. That is
the entire product.

---

## What we built

### Two taps, and the app opens.

This is the real thing, not a recording. Tap *Reveal answer*, then pick the one
that's true. Both are correct answers.

**No skip.** Not on either step. Not ever. A breathing pause is a speed bump. A
forced recall is a lesson. That one distinction is the whole difference between
this and every other blocker, so we will not sell it back to you as a setting.

**No spinner.** The card is already there. Cards are generated and buffered
ahead of the moment you need them, in bulk for bounded topics, refreshed in the
background for open-ended ones. By the time your thumb lands on the icon, the
card has been sitting there waiting.

**No shame.** A deliberate pause, not a lockout. No alarm red. No visible
countdown. No copy about what you must do. "Still learning" is not a failure
state. It is how the scheduler decides when to show that card again, and it is
a perfectly good answer to give.

---

## Eight ways to be asked

Vocabulary wants multiple choice. Code wants a code block. An anatomy deck
wants a picture. Flattening all of that into one question-and-answer shape is
why most flashcards feel like homework.

| Type | Question | Answer |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Basic | What does "laconic" mean? | Using very few words. |
| Cloze | Review at ______ intervals. | increasing |
| Choice | Which scheduler does Popcue use? | SM-2 |
| True or false | Passive re-reading beats active recall. | False |
| Image | Name this: the loopback address. | 127.0.0.1 |
| Code | `useEffect(() => {}, [])` | Runs once, after mount |
| List | Name three blockers that add friction but teach nothing. | One Sec · Opal · Freedom |
| Picture | What is this app icon for? | Notion |

---

## Your notes, wherever you're tempted

Every other quiz-to-unlock app is a closed pipeline: upload a PDF, their model
writes the cards, you live in their content silo. Your agenda is already
somewhere else. Popcue reads from where it is instead of asking you to move
it.

- **Notion**, *Free forever.* Pages you already wrote become the cards you get
  asked about. Connect once with OAuth; nothing gets copied into a silo.
- **Todoist**, *Coming soon.* Not connectable in the app yet. The plan: your
  tasks stop being a to-do list and start being the thing you are quizzed on.
- **AnkiDroid**, *Free forever.* Already keeping decks? Keep them, and keep
  SM-2 scheduling. Popcue becomes purely the interrupt layer, the upgrade
  AnkiBlock never was.
- **Your own LLM**, *Free forever.* Any MCP-compatible endpoint you already
  pay for. You bring the model; we bring the moment.
- **AI-written**, *5 free.* Name a topic and a deck arrives. Five active paths
  free, unlimited on Pro.
- **Starter decks**, *Pro.* Ready-made decks written by us. Preview every card
  before you adopt one.
- **Handwritten**, *No AI.* Type the question yourself. Some things you just
  know better than a model does.

And every card tells you where it came from. A tiny Notion mark in the corner,
so a power user can see their own material is genuinely in play, and so nobody
has to take it on faith.

---

## What we ask for

### Two permissions. That's the whole list.

An app that interrupts the one thing you do all day is allowed to ask for
things. Here is exactly what Popcue asks for, what each one is for, and what
it does with your data, before you decide.

1. **Usage access**, so it can tell when one of the apps you picked opens. It
   reads nothing about what happens inside them, only that they started.
2. **Draw over other apps**, so the card can be the thing on screen instead of
   the app. This is the one that makes a real interruption possible rather than
   a notification you can swipe away.
3. **Only if you use them**: anything else is optional and asked for only when
   you use the feature that needs it: notifications for reminders, photos on
   Android 12 and older to attach an image, AnkiDroid if you connect it. You
   can check every one in Settings → Apps → Popcue → Permissions.

**What leaves your phone:** the account, the goals, and the ratings given to
each card, so the streak, the mastery and the stats are the same on every
device signed in to.

**What doesn't:** anything from the apps you wrap. Popcue is not reading them,
and notes stay in Notion or AnkiDroid until one is connected, in
which case it reads that, and nothing else.

A blocker app is asking for a permanent foothold on your attention. The least
it can do is tell you exactly what it is using it for.

---

## Setup

### Five steps. About three minutes.

This is the actual onboarding order, not a simplification of it.

1. **Name what you're learning.** A goal, in your words. Bounded (something
   with an end you can see) or ongoing, for a topic that never quite finishes.
   Everything after this hangs off it.
2. **Connect where you already keep notes.** Notion, AnkiDroid, or any
   MCP-compatible endpoint of your own (Todoist is coming soon). Skip it and let
   AI write the deck instead. Either is a first-class choice, not a lesser one. You will see a
   real card pulled from your material before you leave the screen.
3. **Pick the apps to wrap.** Any installed app, not a fixed blocklist. Each
   one gets its own ratio and its own active hours, because Instagram at 11pm
   and Slack at 2pm are not the same problem.
4. **Set the ratio, not a lockdown.** Five out of ten opens by default,
   randomized within that, so it never feels like a machine counting. Set active
   hours and it will not touch you outside them.
5. **Grant two permissions.** Usage access and Draw over other apps, each
   explained before the system dialog. Nothing else is required. Then the
   first real card appears and you are in the app.

**Why five out of ten, and not every single time?** A blocker that fires every
time stops being a habit and starts being a punishment, and the person who can
always turn it off is you. A ratio that is sometimes quiet keeps the
interruption rare enough to still be an interruption. Set it to ten out of ten
if you want it every time; that is genuinely your call and we will not argue
with it.

---

## Then it keeps the receipts

- **Cards actually mastered.** Every rating feeds an SM-2 scheduler. "Still
  learning" shortens the interval, "Got it" extends it. The number that goes up
  on your dashboard is the one that means something.
- **A streak with mercy in it.** Streaks get deleted by the person holding the
  phone, and the usual reason is a single missed Tuesday followed by a grim
  week. This one has freezes you earn, rest days you schedule, and a way to
  earn a lost day back by reviewing five cards. Miss it, and tomorrow still
  makes sense.
- **Twenty-six weeks of heatmap.** Not a vanity number. It is the shape of the last
  six months of your attention, with rest days and freezes shown honestly rather
  than quietly counted as success.
- **Company, if you want it.** Ranks, shared projects and leaderboards. Invite
  links are coming soon. Entirely optional: the app is fully usable alone.
- **Decks you can adopt in one tap.** A Pro library of starter decks, each one
  previewable card by card before it touches your goals. See exactly what you
  are being asked before you say yes to it.
- **Stats worth posting.** A shareable summary of what you actually retained.
  Which, if we are honest, is how this whole thing is supposed to spread.

---

## Who it's for

### The Builder

You already keep notes somewhere. Now they get used. Upskilling in small
increments around a job that does not stop (a new framework, a certification,
a language). Your Notion and Anki decks already hold the agenda. Popcue is the
bit that makes you actually look at it, without asking you to build a study
routine you will abandon in nine days.

*Best with: Notion, AnkiDroid, unlimited.*

### The Exam Prepper

Discipline you asked for, without the dread. Studying for something
competitive (GRE, UPSC, JEE, a professional cert) alongside college or a job,
and doom-scrolling between blocks. You asked for interruptions. The important
part is that nothing about them feels like being told off, because the version
of this that feels like being told off gets uninstalled by the second week.

*Best with: a higher ratio, more active hours.*

And if you mainly want to use your phone less, with the learning as a pleasant
side effect rather than the point, you will still get cards, and you will
still not be able to skip them. Just know that is the softer version of what
this is, not the main one.

---

## Stacking up

Ten other app blockers are in this table, because a comparison that names six
when ten are shipping the mechanic reads as a comparison written to flatter us.
Hopopop is the closest thing to Popcue that exists today and it is on iPhone
as well as Android; One Sec is the best-made app in the category; Opal is a
harder block; App Pause covers websites and tablets. All of them are a
reasonable choice. This is only a win if the card is the part you want.

| Feature | Popcue | One Sec | Hopopop | Opal | ScreenZen | FocuzPass | App Pause | Study Lock | AnkiBlock | Tok Blok | LLLock |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Wraps any app you choose | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Puts a question in front of you before you get in | Yes | Partly | Yes | No | Partly | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The question comes from material you already keep | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Works from a live tool, not an exported file | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Interrupts at a per-launch ratio, not a daily quota | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| No skip control on either step | Yes | Partly | Partly | Partly | Partly | No | Yes | Partly | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| Spaced repetition scheduling | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Partly | No | Partly |
| Usable free, with no subscription | Yes | Partly | Partly | Partly | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partly | Yes | Partly | Partly |
| Android | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| iOS | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Blocks websites | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |

Verified against each product's own published listing on 2026-10-01. "Partly"
means the product does some of it, and every partly carries its reason in
COMPARISON_PARTIAL on the site. Sources: one-sec.app, hopopop-app.com,
opal.so, screenzen.co, focuzpass.com, unrushedapps.com, study lock's App Store
listing, AnkiBlock's Play listing, tokblok.app, lllock.app. Popcue is not
affiliated with any of them. The row where Popcue says no is websites: Popcue
does not block them.

Rows are capability claims, verifiable in each product's own listing. Where a
competitor is strong (hard blocking, cross-device sync, polish) we are not
pretending to be a substitute.

---

## Pricing

### Free is the real product.

If your cards come from tools you already use, Popcue costs you nothing,
permanently, with no cap on how many you connect. That is not a trial tier.
Connected paths cost us nothing to serve, so charging for them would be
charging you for your own notes.

**Free**, ₹0 forever:

- Unlimited paths from Notion, AnkiDroid and your own LLM (Todoist is coming soon)
- 5 active AI-written learning paths
- All 8 card types, unlimited manual cards
- Streaks, freezes, rest days and the 26-week heatmap
- Per-app ratios and active hours
- Everything on Android and web

**Pro**, ₹149/month, or ₹999 billed yearly (save 44%): the yearly price works
out at about ₹83 a month, which is arithmetic on the two published prices rather
than a third price of its own:

- Unlimited AI-written learning paths
- The starter-deck library, previewable card by card
- Instant streak recovery, with no ads to watch
- Everything in Free

7-day trial. The app shows the terms before you subscribe.

No locked card type, no watermark, no "upgrade to see your streak," and no fee
for getting back into your own blocker if you change your mind. We will not
charge you to leave.

---

## Questions, answered plainly

**What does Popcue actually do?**
You pick which apps on your phone it should watch. When one of them opens, a
card from your own goals and notes appears instead of the app. You tap to
reveal the answer, then rate whether you got it: "Got it" or "Still
learning." Then the app opens. Both ratings are equally good answers; neither
is a failure.

**Is there a way to skip the card?**
No. There is no skip button, on either step, and there never will be. A
breathing pause is a speed bump; a forced recall is a lesson. That distinction
is the entire product, and adding a bypass would delete it.

**Does it work on iPhone?**
No. Popcue is Android and web only for now, and we would rather ship one
platform properly than hint at a date we cannot stand behind. Android is also
the better fit for this specifically: it lets us build a real interruption
screen, where iOS restricts what third-party apps can show.

**Do I need my own notes to use it?**
No. You can name a topic and let AI write the deck. Five active paths are
free. Connecting Notion, AnkiDroid or your own LLM is where it gets
genuinely useful, and every connected path stays free forever, no matter how
many you add. Todoist is coming soon.

**Why does it pick 5 out of 10 opens, and not every time?**
Because a blocker that fires every single time stops being a habit and starts
being a punishment, and you can always turn it off. Five out of ten,
randomized within the ratio, keeps the interruption rare enough to stay a real
interruption. You choose the number per app.

**What permissions does it need, and why?**
Two for the interrupt itself: usage access, so it knows when one of the apps
you picked opens, and Draw over other apps, so the card can be the thing on
screen. Anything else is optional and asked for only when you use the feature
that needs it: notifications for reminders, photo access on Android 12 and
older to attach an image, and AnkiDroid access if you connect it. Nothing about
what happens inside the apps you wrap. You can check every one of them in
Settings → Apps → Popcue → Permissions.

**Can it block websites, not just apps?**
Not yet. The wrap mechanic is Android-app-shaped today. Browser blocking is on
the roadmap; active hours, per-app ratios and per-goal hours all already work.

**What happens if I want my phone back?**
You can pause any app, adjust its ratio to zero, or turn the whole thing off
from Settings. No email, no support ticket, no fee. Compare that to the apps
that charge you a password-recovery fee to get back into your own blocker.

**What does it cost?**
Free forever if your cards come from your own tools (Notion, AnkiDroid, your
own LLM; Todoist is coming soon), with no cap on how many. Free also includes
five active AI-written paths, all eight card types, streaks and stats. Pro is
₹149/month or ₹999/year, and it exists mainly to lift the AI-path cap and
unlock the starter-deck library. Pro has a seven-day trial, and the app shows
the terms before you subscribe.

**Is Popcue shipped yet?**
Not yet. Popcue is not on the Google Play Store and has no App Store listing, so
there are no public ratings, reviews or install counts for it. The Android and
web builds exist and are being verified; the remaining work is
Play Console setup, a release signing key, and a compliance launch gate. Join
the waitlist and you'll hear when it is on the Play Store, and you'll get the
build earlier.

---

## Contact

hello@popcue.online