Books, languages, lessons and meditations earn obols. Reels, Shorts and TikTok cost them: Charon waits at the gate of every endless feed. No ads, no account, no internet access.
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In the Greek myth, Lethe is the river of forgetting, and Charon ferries souls across it for an obol. An endless feed is the same river: you drink from it, and an hour is gone without a trace.
Obol makes every crossing cost something and pays you for time spent on what matters. Serve the muses and gods of useful time to earn obols; spend them on the far shore when you choose to, not by reflex.
| Feature | How it works | |
|---|---|---|
| 🏛️ | Pantheon | Patrons of useful time: Calliope (reading), Hermes (languages), Athena (learning), Hestia (meditation), Nike (sport). Dedicate your own to anything (guitar, code, a side project) with a name, a symbol, a glaze, a rate, a daily cap, apps and sites. Patrons stand on pedestals that grow with the hours you give them, and crack when you forget them for a week. |
| 🌊 | Lethe | Streams that cost obols: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, VK, Reddit, X, or anything you add, apps and sites alike (youtube.com/shorts works in browsers). Only the endless feed makes Reels and Shorts paid while messages and the rest of the app stay free. |
| ⛵ | Charon's gate | Opening a stream brings up the gate: why do you want to cross, a few breaths, then 5, 15 or 30 minutes, the meter, or a free pass from Hermes' staff. The reel underneath is paused. Turning back is always free. |
| ⏳ | The plaque | While you're on the far shore, a small plaque in the corner counts down the time you paid for, or shows the meter. |
| 🌙 | Tariffs | Nyx's hour (night ×3), the early morning ×2, and a fare that rises with every crossing after the first one today. |
| ⚖️ | Debt to Hades | An empty purse can go below zero, with interest on the borrowed part. |
| 🌫️ | Mist of Lethe | After five minutes on the far shore a grey haze creeps in from the edges of the screen, thickest after twenty-five. |
| 🔮 | The oracle | Each day one patron pays double for two hours, and the oracle tells you when. |
| 🏺 | Temple | A treasury out of Charon's reach that grows 5 % every Monday, and vows: real rewards (a cinema, a book) saved up for in obols. |
| 🕯️ | Rites | Time away from the phone (a paper book, practice, a workout) by a timer that only runs while the phone lies face down. |
| 📜 | Ledger | A potsherd for every day with the reasons you gave Charon, a four-week frieze, and an evening question: what do you remember from the far shore? Days with nothing count as taken by Lethe without a trace. |
| ⚔️ | Oath by the Styx | Swear for 1, 3, 7 or 30 days: tariffs and the gate lock, streams can only get dearer, and Obol becomes a device administrator, so removing it takes extra screens. Breaking the oath is possible, but it stays on record. |
| 💰 | Widget | The purse on the home screen with today's given and taken. |
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Charon is an accessibility service. Once a second it reads which app is in front, the address bar of common browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Samsung Internet, Yandex, Opera, Edge, Brave and others) and, for feed-only streams, the view ids that give away Reels or Shorts. Time counts for a patron only while you touch, scroll or type, or while a meditation plays with the screen off. Past a patron's daily cap the rate halves, so an app left open can't farm obols.
Get the APK from Releases. Obol isn't on Google Play: install the APK, open it and switch Obol on in Settings → Accessibility. It needs Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer.
Tip
On Xiaomi (MIUI / HyperOS), Huawei and some other phones, allow Autostart and remove battery limits, or the system will put Charon to sleep.
Charon keeps a quiet notification, "Charon is on watch". Without it HyperOS freezes the app while a feed is open. You can hide the notification in the system settings; Charon keeps working.
Obol has no internet permission at all: no accounts, no servers, no analytics, no ads. It sees which app and site is open only to count time and draw the gate; nothing is stored beyond the ledger lines, and nothing leaves the phone.
Every screen is written natively in both languages. Switch in Settings → Language.
- Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, Material 3 with a black-figure palette (and a red-figure one by day), the Forum and Alegreya Sans typefaces. Charon's boat, the Greek key, the obols and the pedestals are drawn on a
Canvas. - Room keeps patrons, streams, their apps and sites, the ledger and crossings. The balance is the sum of the ledger; obols laid aside in the temple move into a
heldcolumn and leave the purse without being spent. domain/holds the pure rules (tariffs, debt, earning with caps, site matching, the oracle) with unit tests.
app/src/main/java/app/obol/
├── data/ Room database, settings, presets, demo seed
├── domain/ tariffs, rules, bank, temple, oracle
├── watch/ Charon (accessibility service), the gate, the plaque, the mist, the oath
├── widget/ the purse on the home screen
└── ui/ shore, pantheon, Lethe, ledger, temple, rite, settings
Build it with ./gradlew assembleDebug. ./gradlew installDebug -Pdemo installs app.obol.demo with four weeks of made-up history, the one used for these screenshots.
MIT. Part of Stillcraft, small tools for a quieter mind.