7:41 pm
You meant to check one thing.
hey is an iOS app that notices when you have stopped choosing to be on your phone, and interrupts. No apps to pick, no hours to block, no budget to run down. Nothing at all, until you are actually looping.
iOS · not out yet
What an unchosen hour looks like
- You open it to answer one message.
- Answered.
- A red dot on something else.
- A video you did not go looking for.
- The first app again, for no reason you could name.
- None of it was a decision.
- Still here.
7:410 minutes in
Keep going ↓
8:29 pm · 48 minutes unbroken
hey!
Did you know: “Octopuses have three hearts.”
You are out for a second. Back in whenever you like.
Forty-eight minutes of nothing, then one sentence.
In between, hey was not there. No notification, no chart, no streak, no question. It was watching one thing: how long the phone had been going without a break.
A nudge, not a limit.
Some days you want an hour on your phone, and that hour is yours to spend. The problem is the other kind: you meant to take five minutes, and forty went by without you even realizing it. A limit treats both the same, then locks you out of tomorrow’s hour for what happened tonight.
A show. A long read. An hour of a game you like.
hey does nothing.
One message. A red dot. The first app again.
hey! a few minutes in, and nothing carried into tomorrow.
Your phone stays yours.
App limits, daily budgets, off-limits hours are too heavy handed. A limit forces you into a box, with no give and no way out. hey doesn’t control you or how you use your phone. It is a tap on the shoulder, once, and what you do next is up to you.
Just enough friction.
Kicked out to the home screen is the default: enough to break the loop, not enough to make you turn hey off. One level lighter is a word you can wave off. One level heavier holds the door for a few minutes. You choose.
Put it down, and the count is gone.
The interruption is the whole of it. Leave the phone alone long enough that picking it up again is a fresh decision, and the clock starts from nothing. No daily total building behind you, nothing to pay back later. More friction is there if you want it. It is never required.
- Break
- A gap in phone use long enough that picking the phone up again counts as a fresh, deliberate choice. Glancing away is not one.
Why it exists
“I have ADHD and I wanted something that would kick me out of my unproductive hyperfocus use of my phone — but I didn't want the iron-fist solution of setting time constraints via Screen Time on my phone.”
One email, when it is out.
The day hey reaches the App Store. Nothing before it, nothing after. And when it lands: no card, no account, nothing to cancel.