Review: Focus Friend
Aug. 21st, 2025 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I recently blogged about corporations hacking your brain for profit. And now I’m writing about an app designed to hack your brain to focus on actually doing stuff, “Focus Friend by Hank Green” (and Bria Sullivan of Honey B Games).
It’s a very simple app. When you start it running, you choose a specific period of time during which you are going to focus on something other than playing on your Apple device. During this time, a cartoon bean character begins knitting. When you do anything else on your phone the bean gets distracted and sad and stops knitting. When you succeed in leaving your phone alone, the bean has time to knit quite a lot of socks. And then you can sell these socks to buy decorations for the bean’s room.
So, this is not about rationality. Why spend time setting the timer and decorating an imaginary room if your goal is to actually do stuff? Why is it more motivating to not want to disappoint a cartoon bean than your own self? But people are not always perfectly rational, and when they’re not, it’s so cool if they can work with their weirdnesses to get stuff done anyway. And for people who enjoy the dopamine hits of certain kinds of video games, this app can help them use that enjoyment for something useful.
On first glance, that’s not me. I do like spending too much time on video games, but they aren’t on my phone. They’re on my laptop and tablet. But that’s just a technicality. I can still set the timer and then make myself turn it off if I get off task. In fact, the default setting actually lets you do other things on your phone, and you are just trusted to only focus on the things you want to be doing and not let yourself get distracted.
Another cool thing is how they make their money. Like many apps, it’s free to buy and you can use it for free or spend money for extras (like even faster knitting, or knitting more-valuable scarves, or having a different look for your bean). Unlike other apps, there are no ads. Because there are no ads, they don’t have to collect information. There are actually no scumbags involved. And yet, somehow it jumped to the #1 spot in Apple's App Store in the US and some other English-speaking countries for a while.
It’s a very simple app. When you start it running, you choose a specific period of time during which you are going to focus on something other than playing on your Apple device. During this time, a cartoon bean character begins knitting. When you do anything else on your phone the bean gets distracted and sad and stops knitting. When you succeed in leaving your phone alone, the bean has time to knit quite a lot of socks. And then you can sell these socks to buy decorations for the bean’s room.
So, this is not about rationality. Why spend time setting the timer and decorating an imaginary room if your goal is to actually do stuff? Why is it more motivating to not want to disappoint a cartoon bean than your own self? But people are not always perfectly rational, and when they’re not, it’s so cool if they can work with their weirdnesses to get stuff done anyway. And for people who enjoy the dopamine hits of certain kinds of video games, this app can help them use that enjoyment for something useful.
On first glance, that’s not me. I do like spending too much time on video games, but they aren’t on my phone. They’re on my laptop and tablet. But that’s just a technicality. I can still set the timer and then make myself turn it off if I get off task. In fact, the default setting actually lets you do other things on your phone, and you are just trusted to only focus on the things you want to be doing and not let yourself get distracted.
Another cool thing is how they make their money. Like many apps, it’s free to buy and you can use it for free or spend money for extras (like even faster knitting, or knitting more-valuable scarves, or having a different look for your bean). Unlike other apps, there are no ads. Because there are no ads, they don’t have to collect information. There are actually no scumbags involved. And yet, somehow it jumped to the #1 spot in Apple's App Store in the US and some other English-speaking countries for a while.