A home screen that stops asking for your attention

The home screen

Offly shows the time inside an open ring, today's date, and five app names in plain text. No icons, no badges with red numbers, no widgets, no wallpaper of notifications. Swipe up for every other app, listed alphabetically with a search box. Swipe down for settings, left for your usage, right for a focus session.

Five is a limit, not a suggestion. The sixth app you want is one swipe away, which is enough friction to make you notice you wanted it.

Pauses, limits and sessions

Three kinds of rule, all set by you:

• Schedules pause a group of apps for hours on chosen days: no social apps after 9 pm, none on Sundays, none between 9 and 5.
• Daily limits give an app a budget, say 30 minutes, with a warning before it runs out and the choice of how many sessions the budget can be split into.
• Session limits ask "how long this time?" whenever you open a limited app, then count down on screen in a small pill you can drag around.

When time is up, you choose what happens: the app closes and pauses, or Offly only reminds you. If you ask for five more minutes, you get one extension per session, after a 60-second wait.

The blocked screen

Open a paused app and you see a small pill that says "Blocked by you", a countdown in hours, minutes and seconds, and the exact time and date the app returns. You can take a counted three-minute break, or open the app anyway. Offly never hides that door, because a rule you can't leave is a rule you'll resent and delete.

Before you open anyway, Offly shows a 60 to 90 second ring and your own numbers: how you were doing before Offly, and how you're doing now. Cravings crest and pass in about two minutes. The ring is there to let them.

Loosening a rule takes effect at midnight

You can always change a rule. The change lands at midnight. The person who set the rule this morning and the person who wants to break it at 11 pm are not quite the same person, and the morning one deserves a vote.

Grey screen

Offly can turn the display black and white for chosen apps, after a chosen hour, during your rules, or always. Colour is a large part of what makes feeds feel rewarding; without it, a scroll of photos is just a scroll. In a randomised study of 161 students, phones set to greyscale for a week cut total screen time by an average of 38 minutes a day, most of it from social media and browsing. Read the study.

You get three two-minute colour breaks a day, for when a photo really needs to be seen in colour. This feature uses Android's accessibility service, and Offly explains exactly what that means before turning it on. Read the accessibility disclosure.

Kids mode

Hand your phone to a child without handing over the whole internet. Kids mode is a separate home screen with only the apps you allow, a per-go and a per-day time cap, grey screen always on, and a three-second slow touch that makes frantic tapping impossible. A dull scratch pad is there for drawing. Leaving kids mode needs your PIN or fingerprint, and three wrong tries lock it for a while. Watch it set itself up in the kids mode tour.

Hiding an app

Some apps you don't want to limit. You want them gone. Offly hides an app for two hours, three hours, a day, until Monday, or for good. Timed hides come back on their own. "For good" has no undo: Offly asks you to hold the button to confirm, and after that the only way back is to reinstall the app from the store. That is the point.

Progress without guilt

Offly reads your first 30 days of usage from Android's statistics to know your baseline. From then on, it counts days kept, never days broken. Milestones arrive quietly. When a streak ends, you get a fresh start on Monday, because a clean slate is when people restart best. One short progress note a day, one recap on Sunday, and nothing else. All the research behind these choices.

Also in the box

• Focus: a 25-minute block with an intention you type in. Ending early is allowed and earns nothing.
• Wind-down: a dimmer home screen at a set hour, with notifications held until morning.
• What's this for?: an optional one-line question every time you unlock.
• Digest: notifications delivered in batches at times you choose.
• Buddy: share weekly totals with one friend. Totals only, never which apps.
• Themes: dark or light, eight calm colours, e-ink mode, font size, clock style, and a matching lock-screen wallpaper.