WHY FRICTION WORKS.

The clinical technique is called urge surfing: treat the urge as a wave, delay acting, let it crest and recede — a standard tool in behavioral treatment for compulsive patterns since Alan Marlatt's relapse-prevention work. The practical translation is unglamorous: most urges are minutes long, and anything that reliably inserts minutes between impulse and action wins more often than willpower does. A sealed hour is minutes, industrialized.

The strongest published test of app-level friction is the one sec research program: a peer-reviewed evaluation in PNAS ("Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec," 2023) found that a deliberately inserted pause measurably reduced target-app openings, with effects that persisted over weeks. one sec fights doomscrolling, not betting — but the mechanism it validated is the mechanism a wall uses: make the reflex slower than the feeling, and the feeling passes first.

Self-exclusion programs — the account-level instrument run by operators and state regulators — are the sector's most studied intervention, and the National Council on Problem Gambling's standards work treats exclusion, limits, and friction tools as complementary layers, not competitors. That's Untilt's position in the stack: the device layer, beside the account layer, beneath the human layer. How to enroll, honestly annotated.

No outcome statistics appear on this page because we won't publish numbers we can't stand behind. As anonymized, opt-in beta metrics mature (walls held, re-arm rates), they'll be published here with their methodology. A tool for people burned by rigged numbers doesn't get to use soft ones.