Why a plain list instead of a grid of icons
The icon grid has been the default home screen for so long that it feels like a neutral fact of phones, rather than a design choice someone made. It isn't neutral. A grid of colorful icons with badges is built to catch your eye and get tapped — that's what it's optimized for, and it's very good at its job.
offhand's home screen is a plain list: app names, no icons, no badge counts. It sounds like a small change, and mechanically it is, but the effect is bigger than it looks. A list of text doesn't compete for attention the way a grid of icons does. You open your phone to do the thing you came to do, not to get pulled sideways by whatever happens to be flashing at you.
Friction where it matters, not everywhere
We didn't want a launcher that makes your phone painful to use — that just trains people to route around it. So the pause only shows up in front of apps you've chosen, and it's short: long enough to interrupt an automatic reach, short enough that if you genuinely want to open the app, you still can, in a couple of seconds.
Everything else on your phone stays exactly as fast as it's always been. offhand isn't trying to make your phone worse. It's trying to make the handful of apps that pull hardest slightly less automatic to open, so the decision to open them is actually yours.
Related reading: How to Stop Doomscrolling: Add Friction, Not Willpower