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Олександр КузьменкоThat's Life
26 February 2025, 19:12
2025-02-26
A developer has created an app that makes you tear yourself away from watching bad news and go outside to touch the grass.
Rhys Kentish, a mobile app developer from London, created the app touch grass: reduce screentime to combat the habit of mindlessly scrolling through your news feed. It forces the user to go outside and literally touch the grass, capturing it on camera, which opens up access to the most distracting content.
touch grass went viral even before its release and exceeded all expectations of the developer, who is already receiving many offers for cooperation.
Rhys Kentish, a mobile app developer from London, created the app touch grass: reduce screentime to combat the habit of mindlessly scrolling through your news feed. It forces the user to go outside and literally touch the grass, capturing it on camera, which opens up access to the most distracting content.
touch grass went viral even before its release and exceeded all expectations of the developer, who is already receiving many offers for cooperation.
«I wanted to break the habit of reaching for my phone in the morning and scrolling through it for an hour, so I built an app to help me. Now I literally have to touch the grass before I can access my most distracting apps,» Kentish wrote on the Hacker News forum.
He explained that touch grass is built on SwiftUI and uses Apple’s Screen Time API and Google Vision to recognize grass. According to the developer, he wanted to get user feedback on the concept, but his post received over 1,000 likes on the forum and hundreds of comments in just two days.
«My app went viral before launch today. I don’t know how to react,» the developer wrote on LinkedIn. He said the app and post initially attracted little attention, but when he checked them after lunch, he saw 1,500 visitors in the last 30 minutes alone.
Rhys Kentish said he didn’t expect it to be so popular, so the bandwidth usage was done haphazardly. He had to take out a more expensive subscription to Netlify to buy 1TB of bandwidth.
«I’m getting tons of emails and messages, and I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. I’m getting really cool people reaching out to me, people sending me their resumes, talking about funding, and some really big names contacting me,» the developer noted.
He said it has become a big stressor for him, as the bandwidth issue remains. He added that it helps him calm down when he replies to people via email: «Hi, my app has been much more popular than expected, I saw your message and I will reply to you, but it may take a while.»
«I’m calling my fiancée and people at her work have shared the link. It’s amazing,» said Rhys Kentish, adding that he’s considering migrating to Cloudflare or Bunny.net to cope with the project’s popularity.
«Tired of mindless doomscrolling? touch grass will help you reclaim your time by blocking the most distracting apps until you connect with nature,» the application description says.
Among its features are «intelligent grass detection using machine vision,» tracking time spent on the phone’s screen, and flexible unlock duration settings.
touch grass will have a paid and free version. The premium version will allow you to block unlimited apps and categories, view your screen time history, and provide «deeper insights into your habits.»
Recall that previously, news aggregator SmartNews launched a new feature that will help combat anxiety caused by regular consumption of negative news. This phenomenon is often called «dumscrolling.»
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