Who builds Silex

I built this because I watched someone close to me go through it, and at the time there wasn't much I could actually do. So this is me being useful a bit late.

Quick honesty: I'm not a doctor, and there's no company here. It's one person — Kyrylo Lozovyi, an iOS developer in Kyiv. No investors, no growth team, no data science department, because there's no data.

When it's someone you know, you start reading. I went down a rabbit hole on how betting apps are actually designed — the near-misses, the losses dressed up as wins with a little celebration sound, the whole thing tuned to keep you on the screen. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it. It's not a fair fight. One person is up against a building full of people paid to keep them betting, and we act like willpower should be enough to win that.

So I spent a few weeks of nights building the other side of it. No investors, no ads, no server sitting somewhere with your worst nights on it. And one rule from day one: nothing in this app spins, nothing is random, nothing ever gives you a near-miss. That stuff works — that's exactly why it's not going anywhere near a recovery app.

If it helps you keep your money, it did its job.

How it got built

Silex started in July 2026 as a native iOS app and shipped as version 1.0 in August 2026. The 90-day program was written first, from clinical and academic sources, and the app was built around it — not the other way round. Every screen is SwiftUI; the milestone pieces are rendered with Metal shaders; there is no backend at all.

Being a solo developer has one real disadvantage worth naming: there is no support team, so replies to support@trysilex.com come from me, sometimes a day later. It also has an advantage that matters more in this category: nobody has to grow a number this quarter, so nothing in the app is designed to keep you opening it longer than you need it.

Rules the app doesn't break

These were fixed before the first line of code and have survived every redesign since:

• Nothing playable, ever. No slot animation you can spin, no randomised reward, no near-miss, no mystery box, no fear of missing out. Gambling products work by dosing uncertainty, and a recovery app that borrows those mechanics is feeding the thing it claims to treat. The cold open in onboarding shows a machine playing itself precisely so you cannot touch it.
• The panic button is never paywalled. Neither are the crisis helplines or the lapse support. Charging someone for the worst sixty seconds of their month is indefensible.
• No shame mechanics. Your history is never zeroed. A lapse triggers a lesson, not a punishment, and every milestone you earn is permanent.
• Wellness language, never diagnosis. The app is explicit that it isn't medical care and that its self-check is a snapshot of risk, not a diagnosis.
• Helplines get re-verified every release. They are the one part of the app where a stale number could do real harm.

What Silex is not

It is not treatment, not therapy, and not a substitute for either. If gambling has put you in debt you cannot service, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself, the right next step is a person, not an app — the numbers below are free and answer 24/7.

Contact

Support and press: support@trysilex.com. Privacy questions are answered in the privacy policy, which is unusually detailed on purpose.