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Missoula, Montana’s Hank Green’s passion project to help you stop scrolling is dominating the App Store

Focus Friend, developed by Green and mobile game maker Bria Sullivan, uses an animated character to keep users from getting sucked into their screens.

The top free app in Apple’s 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.

 

BY Grace Snelling

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