Introducing offhand
Most screen-time tools are dashboards. They tell you, after the fact, that you spent two hours in an app you didn't mean to open — which is true, and also useless, because the moment you needed help was before you opened it, not after.
offhand works differently. It replaces your home screen's icon grid with a plain list of apps. There's nothing to tap into by accident, nothing pulling your eye toward a red badge. When you do open something you've flagged as a pull — social feeds, games, whatever it is for you — offhand puts a short pause in front of it first. Not a lockout, not a lecture. Just a few seconds of friction, right at the moment your thumb is already moving on autopilot.
That's the whole idea: make the automatic thing slightly less automatic, and let you decide on purpose whether you actually want to go in.
What you get
- A plain-text home screen instead of an icon grid
- A short, configurable pause in front of the apps you choose
- A daily report that shows up in hours, not a running dashboard you have to go check
- No account, no subscription — one payment, on Android and iPhone
We'll be using this blog for release notes, the occasional deep dive into a design decision, and updates as the product changes. If you want the short version going forward: fewer things fighting for your attention, more of it left over for whatever you actually meant to do with your day.
Related reading: How to Stop Doomscrolling: Add Friction, Not Willpower