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Fast Company
17 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
