You must stay focused. You cannot open TikTok, or Instagram, or whatever little phone games you like to play. If you fail, you will make an anthropomorphic bean very sad, because its knitting project depends on your ability to stay focused.
This is the premise of Focus Friend, a productivity app created by Honey B Games and Hank Green, the longtime online creator/entrepreneur/educator/sock salesman. Though the app was soft launched last month, Focus Friend is only now gaining momentum the App Store charts — likely because Green and his brother, author John Green, are posting about it more — reaching No. 4 among all free apps and No. 2 among productivity apps.
Focus Friend, which is available on iOS and Android, has the bones of a typical productivity app. It invites you to set a timer on your phone, which will temporarily prevent you from opening certain apps (on iOS, the “Deep Focus Mode” setting connects to your own screen time settings, where you can designate which apps to block).
But what makes Focus Friend different is that it assigns you a new friend — a little bean — which you can give a cute name, like Garbanzo, or Susan Bean Anthony, or Eda (it’s short for Edamame).
Your bean needs help focusing on its knitting. And it can only focus if you refrain from opening the apps that distract you from your work. If you successfully complete your focus session, your bean will give you in-game points (socks), which you can use to buy decorations for its room — because the only thing more motivating than helping a bean knit is to buy it a cute poster for its wall.
Focus Friend has a lot in common with Finch, a popular self-care app that incentivizes users to maintain healthy habits by giving them a virtual bird companion. Your bird grows when you complete certain tasks that you set for yourself, like drinking water, brushing your teeth, or cleaning your room. Like the Tamagotchis of yore, these apps exploit our desire to protect a cute bundle of pixels by doing stuff that’s good for us.
Focus Friend is functional as a free app, but you can pay to give your bean different skins — you can make your bean look like a cat (a “Kitt-ney Bean”) or a jelly bean, for example. There’s also a subscription that allows your bean to knit scarves, which can be exchanged for premium decorations. Green posted on Bluesky that Focus Friend is “very much trying to be an ad-free experience because the mobile ad ecosystem kinda blows.” But the app still has to make money to compensate the employees who brought our beans to life.
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