LookAway
LookAway is a smart break reminder that helps reduce eye strain, digital fatigue, and maintain better posture. It's beautifully designed to be perfectly integrated into your macOS experience. It runs quietly in the background, promoting healthier screen habits and long-term productivity without disrupting your workflow.
Get to know LookAway
Who’s behind LookAway?
Hi, my name is Kushagra Agarwal, and I am an indie developer from India. I started developing and designing websites when I was in high school, and started building web apps in college ‒ mostly to earn money freelancing.
In my first job, I was a frontend engineer, but within a year I realized that I enjoy designing more than coding, so I switched careers and became a full time designer at another company. Since then, I've been doing designing full time at various companies ‒ till 2022.
While doing full time work, I have also been building my own apps because I always had the itch to code, just not in a professional environment.
So in 2022, I decided to go full time indie to work on my own apps. It was difficult at first but now I could not be happier. It's the best decision I’ve made.
What’s LookAway and what’s so cool about it?
LookAway started out as a weekend project in October 2023 to solve my own problem. I was having terrible dry eyes and digital strain because of prolonged screen time and I wanted to solve that.
I learned about the 20-20-20 method ‒ every 20 mins, look 20 ft away for 20 seconds, and decided to turn it into an app so I wouldn’t have to rely on remembering it myself.
I made it an a weekend and started using it. Within a few days of using it, i felt the difference so I decided to polish and release it for the world ‒ and the rest is history!
It's my most successful app so far with thousands of daily active users. People love it and reach out to me every day with how much LookAway has helped them.
Since it's release, it has been featured by BrandonButch on his YT, it appeared on The Verge, and many countless personal blogs.
The main goal of LookAway now is to promote healthy screen habits so people can be more productive without worrying about their eye health.
Tool Stack of LookAway
What’s under LookAway’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
I’m very comfortable with Swift ‒ I’ve been building iOS apps since 2015, so it felt like the natural choice for this project. I decided to stick with what I know and go fully native, using a mix of AppKit and SwiftUI. That combination gives me the flexibility of the old-school macOS frameworks with the modern feel and speed of SwiftUI. It also means the app is super lightweight, really fast, and integrates seamlessly with the macOS ecosystem, which was important to me both for performance and for giving users a smooth experience that feels right at home on their Macs.
I’m using LemonSqueezy for licensing, with Supabase handling the backend side of things like license checks and app updates, so everything runs smoothly behind the scenes without me having to worry about building a full backend from scratch.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
I designed everything in Figma and built the app using Xcode. The landing page is built with 11ty.js ‒ it’s lightweight and fast, and easy to tweak, which I really appreciate when I need to make quick updates. For marketing, I’ve been sharing the app on Reddit, Twitter, and a few other places to get the word out.
And to keep track of how things are going, I’m using Mixpanel for analytics and Sentry for error tracking.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
I use Discord for all my notifications ‒ I’ve set up bots to alert me when I get a sale and things like that. I really love it ‒ it keeps everything in one place.
For terminal work, I stick with iTerm2, and Arc is my browser of choice since I can keep separate spaces for all my apps, which helps me stay organized. Some other apps I use a lot are Cleanshot, Klack, and PasteNow ‒ they all make everyday tasks a bit smoother.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I think LookAway is still in the early stages. There's a lot coming to make it the best app for building healthy screen time habits ‒ including stats, an iOS app, breathing exercises, and much more.
I believe we're going to see more people fall into a sedentary lifestyle, and LookAway's mission is to help people break out of that cycle and build small, mindful habits that support long-term wellbeing.
Now, discover LookAway for yourself
Huge thanks to Kush for sharing the story behind LookAway and the details on the building blocks that make it such a unique and useful tool. Now go install it yourself and give your eyes a long-overdue break.