Hank Green’s Focus Friend App Is Climbing The App Store Charts — And It’s Extremely Cute

You must enactment focused. You cannot unfastened TikTok, aliases Instagram, aliases immoderate small telephone games you for illustration to play. If you fail, you will make an anthropomorphic legume very sad, because its knitting task depends connected your expertise to enactment focused.

This is nan premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, nan longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though nan app was soft launched past month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum nan App Store charts — apt because Green and his brother, writer John Green, are posting about it more — reaching No. 4 among each free apps and No. 2 among productivity apps.

Focus Friend, which is disposable connected iOS and Android, has nan bones of a emblematic productivity app. It invites you to group a timer connected your phone, which will temporarily forestall you from opening definite apps (on iOS, nan “Deep Focus Mode” mounting connects to your ain surface clip settings, wherever you tin designate which apps to block).

But what makes Focus Friend different is that it assigns you a caller friend — a small legume — which you tin springiness a tiny name, for illustration Garbanzo, aliases Susan Bean Anthony, aliases Eda (it’s short for Edamame).

Your legume needs thief focusing connected its knitting. And it tin only attraction if you refrain from opening nan apps that distract you from your work. If you successfully complete your attraction session, your legume will springiness you in-game points (socks), which you tin usage to bargain decorations for its room — because nan only point much motivating than helping a legume knit is to bargain it a tiny poster for its wall.

Focus Friend has a batch successful communal pinch Finch, a celebrated self-care app that incentivizes users to support patient habits by giving them a virtual vertebrate companion. Your vertebrate grows erstwhile you complete definite tasks that you group for yourself, for illustration drinking water, brushing your teeth, aliases cleaning your room. Like nan Tamagotchis of yore, these apps utilization our desire to protect a tiny bundle of pixels by doing worldly that’s bully for us.

Focus Friend is functional arsenic a free app, but you tin salary to springiness your legume different skins — you tin make your legume look for illustration a feline (a “Kitt-ney Bean”) aliases a jelly bean, for example. There’s besides a subscription that allows your legume to knit scarves, which tin beryllium exchanged for premium decorations. Green posted connected Bluesky that Focus Friend is “very overmuch trying to beryllium an ad-free acquisition because nan mobile advertisement ecosystem kinda blows.” But nan app still has to make money to compensate nan labor who brought our beans to life.