Hank Green’s Focus Ficus Fict Friend application sets up the tables of the App Store – and it’s extremely cute

Focus Friend, which is available on iOS And Androida bones of a typical productivity application. It invites you to define a timer on your phone, which will temporarily prevent you from opening certain applications (on iOS, the “deep focus mode” setting connects to your own screen time settings, where you can designate the applications to block).

But what makes Focus Friend different is that he attributes a new friend to you – a little bean – that you can give a cute name, like Garbanzo, or Susan Bean Anthony, or EDA (he’s short for Edamame).

Your bean needs helping to focus on knitting. And it can only be concentrated if you refrain from opening the applications that distract you from your work. If you are completing your concentration session successfully, your bean will give you points in play (socks), which you can use to buy decorations for your room – because the only more motivating thing than helping a bean knitting is to buy it a nice poster for its wall.

Focus Friend has a lot in common with BullfinchA popular autonomous application that encourages users to maintain healthy habits by giving them a virtual bird companion. Your bird pushes when you do certain tasks that you fix, like drinking water, you brush your teeth or clean your room. Like the tamagotchis of yesteryear, these applications exploit our desire to protect a nice packet of pixels by doing things that are good for us.

Focus Friend is functional as a free application, but you can pay to give your bean different skins – you can make your bean look like a cat (a “Kitt -Nery bean”) or a Bean Jelly, for example. There is also a subscription that allows your bean to knit scarves, which can be exchanged for premium decorations. Green poster On Bluesky, this friend Focus “tries a lot of being an experience without advertising because the mobile advertising ecosystem blows a little”. But the application must still earn money to compensate for the employees who have given life to our beans.