The bean just wants to knit.
With their back to me, Poe, the name I gave the animated brown bean in the Focus Friend app, is stitching up a little storm that will eventually become socks—if I can leave them alone. Unfortunately, I need to check my texts. I cancel the timer after six minutes, which warns me that Poe’s knitting will unravel and “they’ll be really sad.” Their shoulders slump as their work falls apart and a little bubble appears over their head. “It’s ok, we tried,” they reassure me. It turns out the text I was so desperate to see was spam.
Focus Friend, a productivity timer app designed to keep your off your phone by essentially taking it over to knit, has climbed the mobile charts over the last few days, and as of this writing sits at No. 2 on Google Play and No. 3 on the App Store. The brainchild of developer Bria Sullivan and YouTuber and author Hank Green, it briefly beat out apps like ChatGPT, TikTok and the now infamous Tea.
Focus Friend isn’t the first of its kind, but rather the latest in a growing movement of apps, including Forest, Focus Traveler, Exocus, and Focus Tree, designed to keep users from doomscrolling or dawdling on their phones. Like the Pomodoro method, the time management technique that breaks work into periods of focus and rest, these apps use a timer to encourage users to lock in and tune out everything else. Unlike the traditional, analog Pomodoro, apps have gamified the experience with rewards. For every successful chunk of time I allow the bean to knit uninterrupted, it makes me socks I can then broker for decorations. These go straight into the bean’s living space, a tiny brown room with wood floors that feels woefully empty of any life. I have the power to make the bean’s life better, if only I can keep myself from scrolling.
Sullivan has smartly designed the app in a way that instills a little bit of guilt and a little bit of love for this legume with a Hank Hill ass. (Green, she says, dictated this specific design: “He said the character should be a bean, and it should have a butt crack,” Sullivan says.) Users are asked to name their bean, which wanders around its room making puns (“Beenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Beanage Wasteland”) and wondering in little speech bubbles about “if beans have parents.” Sullivan says it was important to make sure the bean had not only a personality but also a point of view. It gets a little nostalgic about its own past, or wonders about who it is now. “That makes people more emotionally invested in what’s happening,” Sullivan says.
McKenna, a 19-year-old Focus Friend user who declined to give their last name, agrees with that sentiment, crediting the bean’s persona with making the app more “fun” and approachable. Although they’ve found the Pomodoro method and productivity timers to be helpful in general, McKenna says they previously haven’t been able to find one they liked until now. “I have also been using Focus Friend to set a timer for myself in the morning so I am more motivated to be off of my phone and get out of bed,” they add.
Still, even the bean isn’t immune from the siren song of a phone. Sullivan made sure to include them enjoying a little scroll, tongue out, when the app is placed into a break between focus sessions. When we talk on the phone, Sullivan herself is multitasking. She’s busy changing a diaper. “I feel like I use my phone against my will, most of the time,” she says. “I feel kind of addicted to it.” Instead of being present, Sullivan says, she’s always scrolling. “There’s times where I feel like I should be focusing on my baby while she’s, like, eating, or meditating and just being present,” she says, adding that “there’s a lot of guilt that comes with owning a phone and participating in technology these days.”
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