I have always cared about beans. Hank Green is exploiting that love to encourage me to spend time off my phone.
Green, who is famous for always working on many projects at once, created Focus Friend a few days ago. It's already the number one free app on the App Store, usurping ChatGPT, and has been downloaded over 100,000 times on the Google Play Store. All you do is spend time off your phone. The bean knits a sock, and you use that sock to decorate the bean's house. It's kind of like cozy gaming, but you don't spend much time actually gaming.
"It's an app that installs a bean in your phone. And the bean really wants to spend more time knitting," he explained in a TikTok video on Monday. "You can focus for an amount of time, and that will let the bean make socks or scarves, and you can trade those socks or scarves in for more furniture in the bean's room."
While the game is free, there are in-app purchases. For instance, if you spend a little money, your bean can be a cat bean or a coffee bean instead of the automatic pinto bean, or your bean can knit scarves instead of socks, which are worth more. Users have asked for more characters for free, but Green defends his use of in-app purchases because the app itself is completely ad-free, and the in-app purchases don't actually make the app run better; they just make it a bit more personalizable. He explains that he discussed adding advertisements with the developer, an indie app creator named Bria, because it would likely be incredibly lucrative and would allow them to further develop the app faster.
"The app is about giving people their time back. It's about letting people be in control of their attention, not selling their attention to someone else," he said in another TikTok video. "So what we decided to do is a free app with no ads, and that means in-app purchases. And that doesn't break the app."
And, for the most part, people seem pretty pleased with that decision.
"I love the app!!! This is convincing me to get the paid version. Thank you for creating it!" one person commented.
"It not having ads is what made me download it. Thank you!" another person commented.
Of course, not everyone is totally pleased with every aspect of the app. For instance, @lucieeatsatl has beef with the currencies. "The regular currencies are socks and the premium currencies are scarves," she said in a TikTok video with more than 66,000 views. "However, as a knitter, it feels obvious that they should be switche[d]. Socks are generally considered to be a much harder project tha[n] scarves."
Jokes aside, this app is pretty nice. I love my bean and want to give him a good home.