Request for help: Android app to shut down a smartphone late at night

I have been playing around with life hacking ideas inspired by hyperbolic discounting.

One idea that seems to have worked reasonably well is was the idea that I could get to bed on time better if my computer simply switched itself off at a certain time, with absolutely no way (that I am capable of executing!) to make it work until the morning. I found and paid for a piece of software that does this—isurveillance shutdown timer. Unfortnately, this seems to have just shifted my late night computer use to my android mobile device, though gaming sessions that last till 5am are a thing of the past.

So, I’d like an android app that shuts down your (rooted) android phone if it is ever detected on within a prespecified time window on a particular day—e.g. between 11pm and 6am, with no way for the user to circumvent the shutdown. If the user restarts the phone, it should shut down again immediately when it finds out that the time is not within the specified window.

I have looked for something like this on Google Play, however most offerings will shut down the phone *once*, but it will stay on if you switch it on again.

LW being a community of tech-savvy people, I was wondering whether anyone was interested in building such an app? It probably isn’t hard to do if you are already an android developer, and I think it would really improve my life, and possibly the lives of other people. You could even make it a paid app—I’d pay. In fact I will commit to paying $50 for the app if someone develops this app and it works as described. If the community finds it useful, I’d expect there’d be some karma in it too. Alternatively if anyone can *find* such an app, I’d be extremely grateful.

A more advanced version of this would be to lock the phone into “emergency calls only” mode within a specific time window. I don’t know how hard that would be to pull off.

This idea might even be good enough to turn into a business—millions of people around the world have the same problem. The requirement to root the device obviously puts something of a dampener on the viability of a business, there may be legal issues with rooting devices as part of a business.