Name: Brick Night
Brand: Brick

Brick Night blocks the apps you pick the moment your phone enters your bedroom, with no tap, no button and nothing to remember. Brick, the company behind the small puck that locks distracting apps until you touch your phone to it again, has built a second device aimed at the scrolling people do in bed. The bet is that the room, not willpower, should decide when the feeds go quiet.

That changes the routine more than it sounds. With the original Brick, you have to decide to lock yourself out every time. Brick Night sits on the nightstand and works in the background: during the hours you set, walk into the room and the apps you chose stop opening; walk out, or let the window end, and they come back. As The Verge put it, the blocking happens automatically, so it does not add a new step to the way you already go to bed.

The device costs $129, more than twice the $59 of the original Brick. It needs no charging and no Wi-Fi, running on two CR2477 coin batteries that come in the box, and measures 73 by 73 by 45 millimetres, about the size of a drinks coaster. During setup you calibrate a zone of up to 25 by 25 feet, roughly 7.6 by 7.6 metres, which covers most bedrooms. The Brick app, available for iPhone and Android, works out how close your phone is from the strength of the Bluetooth signal.

One Brick Night can serve a whole bedroom. Each person links it to their own Brick app and sets their own blocked apps, modes and time windows, so a couple does not have to agree on a single bedtime for Instagram or the news.

Brick’s case for a physical object rather than a phone setting is blunt. Its own FAQ says Screen Time on iPhone and Digital Wellbeing on Android are easy to bypass, because one tap on “skip” puts you straight back in. On the product page, Brick cites a study of more than 45,000 people, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, which linked each extra hour of screen time in bed to higher odds of insomnia symptoms and 24 minutes less sleep a night.

The limits are real, though. Bluetooth signal strength is an estimate, not a wall, which is why the setup needs calibrating, and Brick says the zone can stretch beyond a single room. Brick Night also has no NFC, so it cannot do the original Brick’s tap-to-lock trick and cannot replace it; people who want both pay $188 for the pair, or $169 at the bundle’s current sale price. And only the apps you choose are blocked. A Brick Night does not stop you picking up an unconnected tablet, and the HSA and FSA payment option Brick advertises applies only in the United States.

Outside the US, Brick says it ships worldwide and fulfils orders from local warehouses in the United States, the Netherlands for the European Union, Australia and Canada, with taxes and duties included at checkout in those markets. Buyers in Latin America, most of Asia and other regions may pay import duties on delivery, and the device is listed only in US dollars, with no local prices announced.

Brick Night went on sale on Friday, October 23, with free shipping and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The phone still comes to bed with you. The feeds just stop at the door.

Tags: screen time, app blockers, Brick, Brick Night, Digital Wellbeing, doomscrolling