Latest news with #HankGreen
NBC News
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- NBC News
Scrolling instead of working? YouTuber Hank Green's new app wants to help
Can a smiley cartoon bean help you stay focused? Hank Green, one of the earliest and most influential online creators, hopes so. The longtime YouTuber, known for his educational videos and Vlogbrothers channel, created a productivity app called Focus Friend with the goal of instilling healthy habits. This week, it soared to No. 1 on Apple's top free apps chart, surpassing Google, ChatGPT and Threads. As of Wednesday, it's been downloaded over 100,000 times on the Google Play Store. Focus Friend allows users to set a timer to get a task done, similar to other productivity tools. The app temporarily blocks distractions, like social media, while the timer runs its course. Unlike other apps, Focus Friend assigns users a little bean, which the user can give a name like Bean Diesel, Pinto or Eda (for Edamame). If the user successfully focuses for the timer's duration, the bean is able to finish their knitting project. But if the user picks up their phone in the middle, the bean gets distracted and drops their knitting needles. The more the user focuses, the more socks the bean knits, which can be exchanged for bean room decor. 'It's an app that installs a bean in your phone. And the bean really wants to spend more time knitting,' Green said in a TikTok video on Monday. 'You can focus for an amount of time, and that will let the bean make socks or scarves, and you can trade those socks or scarves in for more furniture in the bean's room.' Focus Friend launched amid an onslaught of AI slop — low quality media generated by artificial intelligence — and a rise in "doomscrolling" (spending excessive time scrolling online). The app is the latest productivity tool to incentivize a healthy relationship with screen time. Focus Friend echoes products like the popular '90s-era Tamagotchi, a handheld video game that allows users to care for a small mythical pet. Finch, another gamified focus app, has also risen in popularity since launching in 2021. It assigns users a customizable bird that grows when they complete self-determined tasks, like cleaning or drinking water. Focus Friend began as a 'passion project' between Green and developer Bria Sullivan, who is behind Honey B Games' Boba Story, which allows players to design their own boba drinks. In January 2024 Sullivan said she met Green over dinner, where they discussed the idea of creating an app that would serve as an alternative way to support creators (besides creator merchandise). Sullivan suggested a focus timer, while Green devised the anthropomorphic bean and its knitting hobby. Sullivan hopes the app can help people reduce their time 'doomscrolling,' a habit she herself also hopes to break out of. 'Especially with social media and things like that, I don't feel like I'm having fun,' Sullivan said. 'I don't feel like I'm an active participant in it.' Green, who many often lovingly describe as 'the internet's dad,' began posting YouTube videos in 2007 with his brother, author John Green. The two went on to launch Crash Course, a YouTube channel that has offered free, high-quality educational videos since 2012. The channel, which has over 16 million subscribers, touches on topics including biology and global history. The brothers also created VidCon, the massive creator and fan conference that's been held annually in Anaheim, California, since 2010. But Hank Green's online fame has also prompted a lot of self-reflection. The creator has been vocal about his own relationship to the internet, including the downsides, telling TechCrunch last year that he's 'been trained by the algorithms and by my colleagues to be extraordinarily good at grabbing and holding people's attention.' 'I hope I use that skill for good, but I also use it for distracting people from whatever else they would be doing,' he told the publication. Now, with Focus Friend, Hank Green is moving toward 'giving people their time back,' he said in his TikTok video Monday. 'It's about letting people be in control of their attention, not selling their attention to someone else.' The app launched in July but only recently picked up traction after the Green brothers began posting more about it on social media, where they have millions of followers. 'We didn't have any idea that it would get this big, nor did we even have the intention for it,' Sullivan said. 'The intention we had behind it was, 'This is an idea I think should exist in the world.'' Some, like TikTok creator Hannah Rae, who goes by hannahsendlessbookshelf on the platform, were immediately hooked. She posted her reaction to the app in a video, calling it a 'cure' to her 'reading slump.' 'It does tend to be easier for the majority of us to do the 'right thing' for something else we want to care for, rather than just doing it for our own benefit in the first place,' Rae said. So far, she said it's helped incentivize her to put her phone down. She said her sister, a teacher, uses it to focus on her lesson planning, and her brother, 11, uses it while doing homework. While the ADHD-friendly app is free to download from the app store, users can pay for different bean avatars, including a ' John Bean ' option resembling Hank's brother. There's also a subscription model where users can knit scarves to trade for elevated decorations. Green's express goal is to avoid burdening users with ads. Focus Friend is 'very much trying to be an ad-free experience because the mobile ad ecosystem kinda blows,' Green wrote in a post on BlueSky. Aside from helping their bean knit a sock or a scarf, Sullivan said she hopes Focus Friends users are 'taking a break from the noise and having a little bit of peace with themselves.'
Fast Company
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Hank Green's passion project to help you stop scrolling is dominating the App Store
The top free app in the App Store right now is a passion project from Hank Green that includes a sentient bean, knitted socks, and home decorating. Its entire goal is to get you to put your phone down. The app, called Focus Friend, was made through a collaboration between Green—an author, YouTuber, and science educator—and Bria Sullivan, founder of the mobile game studio Honey B Games. Sullivan describes the app as a 'gamified focus timer,' built with the primary goal of encouraging users not to doomscroll on social media. So far, it's working shockingly well: After soft launching in late July, the app has risen all the way to the top of the App Store in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, amassing 740,000 downloads as of this writing. For years, solutions to smartphone addiction—like the pared-down dumbphone have been gaining popularity. Now, Focus Friend is demonstrating that there's a broadening market for more creative solutions to our reliance on the scrolling-induced dopamine rush. What is Focus Friend? Focus Friend centers around an adorable animated bean who loves to knit and decorate his room. When the user sets a timer in the app, the bean is able to knit in peace—as long as no other apps are opened. Once the time is complete, he produces knit goods like socks that can be used to purchase quaint little decorations. If he's interrupted, though, his knitting is ruined and he becomes visibly sad. The app's entire premise revolves around users' desire to avoid disappointing the bean at all costs. Currently, Focus Friend has a free mode and a pro subscription tier. To get the benefits of the app's free version, users need to turn on 'deep focus mode.' This setting allows Focus Friend to block almost every other app while a focus timer is on, except for essentials like messages and calls. With the pro tier, users earn socks faster, gain access to premium decorations, and are able to personally edit the list of apps that are blocked by Focus Friend. The subscription costs $1.99 per month, $14.99 per year, or $29.99 for a lifetime. So far, Sullivan says, the lifetime option is proving most popular. The massive response to Focus Friend has come as a shock to both Sullivan and Green. 'Hank and I thought this was going to be a niche, cute little app,' Sullivan says. 'We were hoping that some people would like it, and thought his super loyal fans would probably be the ones who were interested in it. I don't think we really had a sense of it getting to where it is right now.' A cute mascot for the tech-weary The idea for Focus Friend started during a casual conversation over dinner. Sullivan mentioned to Green that she had been thinking about how the mobile app could be the next frontier of merch for creators. Green later followed up with Sullivan about the comment, launching them into a months-long ideation process for the app. Since Green specializes in educational content, Sullivan suggested a focus timer as a good format for an app his audience might enjoy. Green liked the idea, but found that the focus apps he'd already tested weren't always effective at keeping him from scrolling. That insight led them to developing a central character to lightly guilt trip users into sticking with the timer. It's somewhat akin to a character like Duo, Duolingo's cute green owl who convinces users to keep up with their language lessons, or Finch, the self-care app that helps people tackle their to-do lists by nuturing a little bird. Green fronted the costs for Sullivan to hire a few contract employees, including animator Noelle Brandmier, composer Samantha van der Sluis, and artist @euaruu, but he didn't actually commission its development. Instead, Sullivan says, the work was purely a passion project for the two of them. Most of the time, she was the only person building the app. 'This was just something that him and I have been working on for the past year and a half, and we did it out of the love of wanting to see something like this come to fruition,' Sullivan says. While Focus Friend takes a unique approach, the desire for tools like it isn't new. For the past several years, the dumbphone —or '90s-inspired phones with pared-back features— have been gaining traction in the mainstream. But many people find that it's just not realistic to give up smartphones and social media altogether, leaving focus tools to fill that gap. There's been the Brick app, a physical device that temporarily removes distracting apps and notifications from your phone; Aperture, a phone case that turns your screen into a series of minimal widgets; and Touch Grass, an app that will make you literally touch grass before you can doomscroll on TikTok. Focus Friend's true innovation is combining this middle-of-the-road approach with the human desire to please a cute character. 'At first, it was just going to be about taking care of the character, but that turned into whatever the Bean was knitting would break,' Sullivan says. 'I don't think we realized how bad people didn't want to disappoint this little bean.'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hank Green's Focus Friend app is climbing the App Store charts — and it's extremely cute
You must stay focused. You cannot open TikTok, or Instagram, or whatever little phone games you like to play. If you fail, you will make an anthropomorphic bean very sad, because its knitting project depends on your ability to stay focused. This is the premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, the longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though the app was soft launched last month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum the App Store charts — likely because Green and his brother, author John Green, are posting about it more — reaching No. 4 among all free apps and No. 2 among productivity apps. Focus Friend, which is available on iOS and Android, has the bones of a typical productivity app. It invites you to set a timer on your phone, which will temporarily prevent you from opening certain apps (on iOS, the 'Deep Focus Mode' setting connects to your own screen time settings, where you can designate which apps to block). But what makes Focus Friend different is that it assigns you a new friend — a little bean — which you can give a cute name, like Garbanzo, or Susan Bean Anthony, or Eda (it's short for Edamame). Your bean needs help focusing on its knitting. And it can only focus if you refrain from opening the apps that distract you from your work. If you successfully complete your focus session, your bean will give you in-game points (socks), which you can use to buy decorations for its room — because the only thing more motivating than helping a bean knit is to buy it a cute poster for its wall. Focus Friend has a lot in common with Finch, a popular self-care app that incentivizes users to maintain healthy habits by giving them a virtual bird companion. Your bird grows when you complete certain tasks that you set for yourself, like drinking water, brushing your teeth, or cleaning your room. Like the Tamagotchis of yore, these apps exploit our desire to protect a cute bundle of pixels by doing stuff that's good for us. Focus Friend is functional as a free app, but you can pay to give your bean different skins — you can make your bean look like a cat (a 'Kitt-ney Bean') or a jelly bean, for example. There's also a subscription that allows your bean to knit scarves, which can be exchanged for premium decorations. Green posted on Bluesky that Focus Friend is 'very much trying to be an ad-free experience because the mobile ad ecosystem kinda blows.' But the app still has to make money to compensate the employees who brought our beans to life.
TechCrunch
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- TechCrunch
Hank Green's Focus Friend app is climbing the App Store charts — and it's extremely cute
You must stay focused. You cannot open TikTok, or Instagram, or whatever little phone games you like to play. If you fail, you will make an anthropomorphic bean very sad, because its knitting project depends on your ability to stay focused. This is the premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, the longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though the app was soft launched last month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum the App Store charts — likely because Green and his brother, author John Green, are posting about it more — reaching No. 4 among all free apps and No. 2 among productivity apps. Focus Friend, which is available on iOS and Android, has the bones of a typical productivity app. It invites you to set a timer on your phone, which will temporarily prevent you from opening certain apps (on iOS, the 'Deep Focus Mode' setting connects to your own screen time settings, where you can designate which apps to block). But what makes Focus Friend different is that it assigns you a new friend — a little bean — which you can give a cute name, like Garbanzo, or Susan Bean Anthony, or Eda (it's short for Edamame). Your bean needs help focusing on its knitting. And it can only focus if you refrain from opening the apps that distract you from your work. If you successfully complete your focus session, your bean will give you in-game points (socks), which you can use to buy decorations for its room — because the only thing more motivating than helping a bean knit is to buy it a cute poster for its wall. Focus Friend has a lot in common with Finch, a popular self-care app that incentivizes users to maintain healthy habits by giving them a virtual bird companion. Your bird grows when you complete certain tasks that you set for yourself, like drinking water, brushing your teeth, or cleaning your room. Like the Tamagotchis of yore, these apps exploit our desire to protect a cute bundle of pixels by doing stuff that's good for us. Focus Friend is functional as a free app, but you can pay to give your bean different skins — you can make your bean look like a cat (a 'Kitt-ney Bean') or a jelly bean, for example. There's also a subscription that allows your bean to knit scarves, which can be exchanged for premium decorations. Green posted on Bluesky that Focus Friend is 'very much trying to be an ad-free experience because the mobile ad ecosystem kinda blows.' But the app still has to make money to compensate the employees who brought our beans to life. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW
Forbes
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Hank Green Rocks MIT Commencement
Hank Green giving his graduation address This year, the Keystone speaker at MIT's commencement ceremony was a YouTuber. OK, that's pretty reductive in covering this guy's career. Hank Green has a big track record when it comes to technology. In addition to his YouTube channels, including SciShow and Crash Course, he cofounded a company called Complexly dealing in educational media, and runs podcasts, writes novels and promotes STEM learning, also delving into a wide variety of scientific questions and inspiring curiosity, which he did from the podium, too. Hank Green is the most known YouTuber for high school and middle school STEM students. Curiously enough, Green started out with some bone facts – that skeletons have an average of 25,000 calories in them (that's a lot of Big Macs), that 50% of our bones are in our hands and feet, and that there's enough oxygen in a human skeleton to last someone in 24 hours, if we ended up breathing our own bones, which is indeed a very strange scenario. Moving on… Bones aside, much of the meat of Green's speech centered on actual responses provided to him by large numbers of MIT graduates. It turns out that he had circulated a survey among them asking several questions about the future. One of these questions was: 'what is the most MIT thing you did at MIT?' Green revealed to his audience that the most common word in the responses was 'built.' 'You built robots, and bridges, and incubators, and startups, and Geiger counters and a remote-controlled shopping cart and a ukelele and an eight-foot-wide periodic table,' he said. 'Y'all built … a lot. And that is something I found reassuring. We are going to need to do a lot of building.' Green talked about how that jibes with his experience in creating so many projects and always trying to learn new things. 'I've done TikTok dances to Elmo remixes, and I've also published two best-selling science fiction novels,' he said, also referencing his experience writing 'fart listicles.' 'I've interviewed presidents. I've made multiple videos about giraffe sex, and I've sold multiple companies. I helped build an educational media company that provides videos for free to everyone with an internet connection, and our content is used in most American schools.' Green was also frank about what MIT graduates are facing right now. Some of the issues, he noted, are coming from 'inside the house' – he mentioned 'attacks on speech, on science, on higher education, on trans rights, on the federal workforce, on the rule of law…' And then there's the pace of AI acceleration, which naturally makes humans feel uncertain. 'I would want some advice,' he said. With that in mind, he went over four pieces of advice that he had seen listed on the survey: One was to open a Roth IRA. Others were more ideological – such as don't accept any one definition of success, strive for collaboration, and practice resilience, as in this maxim he produced from his response list: 'Even if it probably won't work, try anyway.' And then there's this one: 'Start with the problem, not the solution.' Although he did reach out to a lot of people in preparing his commencement address. Green said he didn't use Claude. He noted that where he asked in the survey about what gives graduates hope, they mentioned people- family and friends, and the innate capabilities of the human mind. 'Do not forget how special and bizarre it is to get to live a human life,' he said, promoting experimentation and boldness, 'consequences be damned.' 'You decide how you orient.' Green also went into more about what we encounter as humans when we try to orient ourselves in the best way. One force, he said, consists of 'powerful mechanisms,' (he cited social media) that don't always align with our own best interests. And then there's the strong capitalist imperative. 'The capitalist impulse is very good at keeping us oriented toward the problems that can be most easily monetized, and that means an over-weighting toward the problems that the most powerful and wealthy people are interested in solving,' he said. I thought that was pretty astute. Overall, Green exhorted graduating students to be attuned to the 'everyday solvable problems of normal people.' 'I desperately hope that you remain curious about our world's intensely diverse and massive problem space,' he said. 'Solvable problems that are not being addressed because our world does not orient us toward them. If you can control your obsessions, you will not just be unstoppable, you will leave this world a much better place than you found it.' Another of his pieces of advice was, again, related to exploring, and not waiting for perfection before starting out on the journey, something I think our students needed to hear. 'Ideas do not belong in your head,' he said. 'They can't help anyone in there. I sometimes see people become addicted to their good idea. They love it so much, they can't bring themselves to expose it to the imperfection of reality. Stop waiting. Get the ideas out. You may fail, but while you fail, you will build new tools.' In conclusion, Green summarized a lot of his exhortations, with a people-centered view: 'When I asked you what you did at MIT, you said you built, but when I asked you what was giving you hope, you did not say 'buildings,' you said 'people.' So, to the graduating Class of 2025, go forth, for yourself, for others, and for this beautiful, bizarre world.' This was really an exceptional address and badly needed at this time. I thought it was wonderfully inspirational to our students. Let's go forth and make this an MIT summer!
