Can a smiley cartoon bean help you stay focused? Hank Green, one of the earliest and most influential online creators, hopes so.
The longtime YouTuber, known for his educational videos and Vlogbrothers channel, created a productivity app called Focus Friend with the goal of instilling healthy habits. This week, it soared to No. 1 on Apple’s top free apps chart, surpassing Google, ChatGPT and Threads. As of Wednesday, it’s been downloaded over 100,000 times on the Google Play Store.
Focus Friend allows users to set a timer to get a task done, similar to other productivity tools. The app temporarily blocks distractions, like social media, while the timer runs its course. Unlike other apps, Focus Friend assigns users a little bean, which the user can give a name like Bean Diesel, Pinto or Eda (for Edamame).
If the user successfully focuses for the timer’s duration, the bean is able to finish their knitting project. But if the user picks up their phone in the middle, the bean gets distracted and drops their knitting needles. The more the user focuses, the more socks the bean knits, which can be exchanged for bean room decor.
“It’s an app that installs a bean in your phone. And the bean really wants to spend more time knitting,” Green said 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.”
Focus Friend launched amid an onslaught of AI slop — low quality media generated by artificial intelligence — and a rise in “doomscrolling” (spending excessive time scrolling online).
The app is the latest productivity tool to incentivize a healthy relationship with screen time.
Focus Friend echoes products like the popular ’90s-era Tamagotchi, a handheld video game that allows users to care for a small mythical pet. Finch, another gamified focus app, has also risen in popularity since launching in 2021. It assigns users a customizable bird that grows when they complete self-determined tasks, like cleaning or drinking water.
Focus Friend began as a “passion project” between Green and developer Bria Sullivan, who is behind Honey B Games’ Boba Story, which allows players to design their own boba drinks.
In January 2024 Sullivan said she met Green over dinner, where they discussed the idea of creating an app that would serve as an alternative way to support creators (besides creator merchandise). Sullivan suggested a focus timer, while Green devised the anthropomorphic bean and its knitting hobby.
Sullivan hopes the app can help people reduce their time “doomscrolling,” a habit she herself also hopes to break out of.
“Especially with social media and things like that, I don’t feel like I’m having fun,” Sullivan said. “I don’t feel like I’m an active participant in it.”
Green, who many often lovingly describe as “the internet’s dad,” began posting YouTube videos in 2007 with his brother, author John Green. The two went on to launch Crash Course, a YouTube channel that has offered free, high-quality educational videos since 2012. The channel, which has over 16 million subscribers, touches on topics including biology and global history. The brothers also created VidCon, the massive creator and fan conference that’s been held annually in Anaheim, California, since 2010.
But Hank Green’s online fame has also prompted a lot of self-reflection. The creator has been vocal about his own relationship to the internet, including the downsides, telling TechCrunch last year that he’s “been trained by the algorithms and by my colleagues to be extraordinarily good at grabbing and holding people’s attention.”
“I hope I use that skill for good, but I also use it for distracting people from whatever else they would be doing,” he told the publication.
Now, with Focus Friend, Hank Green is moving toward “giving people their time back,” he said in his TikTok video Monday. “It’s about letting people be in control of their attention, not selling their attention to someone else.”
The app launched in July but only recently picked up traction after the Green brothers began posting more about it on social media, where they have millions of followers.
“We didn’t have any idea that it would get this big, nor did we even have the intention for it,” Sullivan said. “The intention we had behind it was, ‘This is an idea I think should exist in the world.’”
Some, like TikTok creator Hannah Rae, who goes by hannahsendlessbookshelf on the platform, were immediately hooked. She posted her reaction to the app in a video, calling it a “cure” to her “reading slump.”
“It does tend to be easier for the majority of us to do the ‘right thing’ for something else we want to care for, rather than just doing it for our own benefit in the first place,” Rae said.
So far, she said it’s helped incentivize her to put her phone down. She said her sister, a teacher, uses it to focus on her lesson planning, and her brother, 11, uses it while doing homework.
While the ADHD-friendly app is free to download from the app store, users can pay for different bean avatars, including a “John Bean” option resembling Hank’s brother. There’s also a subscription model where users can knit scarves to trade for elevated decorations. Green’s express goal is to avoid burdening users with ads.
Focus Friend is “very much trying to be an ad-free experience because the mobile ad ecosystem kinda blows,” Green wrote in a post on BlueSky.
Aside from helping their bean knit a sock or a scarf, Sullivan said she hopes Focus Friends users are “taking a break from the noise and having a little bit of peace with themselves.”
