Comparisons
Stryct blocks the app, so you physically can't open it. BePresent leaves the app accessible and tries to make you not want to, with points, rewards, and competition with friends. That's the whole difference, and here's what it actually means in practice.
Stryct and BePresent both target the same problem, too much time on the same handful of apps, but they take opposite approaches to the actual mechanic. With Stryct, a blocked app is genuinely inaccessible for the duration of a session. With BePresent, every app stays open and available the whole time; the app tracks your usage and rewards you for staying away, but nothing stops you from tapping the icon. BePresent has real numbers behind that approach, a 4.8-star rating across more than 39,000 App Store reviews, so this comparison treats it accordingly.
No. During a Block Now session or a scheduled block, the app is inaccessible. There's no button that opens it anyway.
Yes, always. The app stays on your home screen and opens normally. BePresent tracks whether you opened it and adjusts your rewards accordingly.
Everything else in this comparison, price, ratings, social features, follows from that one difference. BePresent's entire feature set (points, streaks, leaderboards, real-life rewards) exists to make the reward for NOT opening the app feel better than the pull to open it. Stryct skips that calculation entirely by removing the option, which is the same principle behind why willpower-based advice tends to fail: it works precisely because it doesn't ask anything of you in the moment.
BePresent's core loop, per its own App Store listing: hourly scrolling-awareness reminders, daily and weekly time reports with a day-before comparison, a points and rewards system for staying off flagged apps, and social competition with friends. None of it functions as a hard block. The apps are still there; the system is trying to change whether you want to open them.
Leaving the app accessible and hoping the reward feels better than the pull is only as reliable as your worst moment. That's not a criticism of BePresent's execution, its rating suggests the execution works for a lot of people, it's a structural observation about what happens when the option to open the app is never actually removed. Stryct exists for the version of this problem where the app needs to just not be there.
If what actually works for you is a system that rewards good behavior rather than a wall that removes the bad behavior entirely, BePresent's approach is a legitimate, well-reviewed option that Stryct doesn't try to replicate. Stryct also has no social or competitive features at all, which some people genuinely find motivating and would miss.
The apps just aren't there while a block is running. Free 3-day trial on iPhone.
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