Focus Shield
Protect your focus on Mac. Keep distractions away!
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Focus Shield is a free Mac menu bar app that blocks YouTube, Netflix, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and Prime Video in Chrome and Safari. Want to switch it off? First you read three short facts from books on attention by Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari, Cal Newport and Gloria Mark. Still sure? Pause it for 30 minutes or an hour, and it turns itself back on. New in 1.2: automatic updates. Signed and notarized by Apple, no account needed, and your browsing never leaves your Mac.
PH · launched Sep 29, 2026 · 2 upvotes (top 26%) · 0 views
Niche: distraction and screen time blockers · 257 launches, 30 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
- Mac
- Productivity
- GitHub
- Menu Bar Apps
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 257 launches in distraction and screen time blockers →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a basic macOS UI is easy, but intercepting and blocking specific URLs across third-party browsers without relying solely on easily bypassed browser extensions requires low-level system or network extensions.
What it would actually take: A native macOS app needs to utilize either the macOS Network Extension framework (NEFilterDataProvider) for system-level packet/URL inspection or AppleScript/Accessibility APIs to detect active browser URLs in Safari and Chrome. Handling HTTPS traffic interception without breaking SSL or installing user-trusted root certificates requires deep macOS systems programming in Swift/Objective-C. It also requires proper entitlements, code signing, and sandboxing approvals from Apple.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 523 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #202 of 524 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 211 days after the earliest competitor.
- Focus Firewall · ph · 2026-09-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Focus Zip · ph · 2026-10-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- FocusTube · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- TubeFocus · ph · 2026-10-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- CutFocus · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Do Not Distracted — Focus OS · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- FocusPass: App Blocker · ph · 2026-10-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Pagewood · ph · 2026-10-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.