Open a book instead
PlayTime is a phone app that swaps the endless feed for an illustrated field guide. Read one short chapter, play five quick questions, rest at camp. Five minutes, then it lets you go.
A replacement
Blockers slam the door on the scroll and leave the urge pacing outside, which is why they get switched off by Thursday. PlayTime keeps the habit and swaps what it feeds on. The reach for your phone still lands on something new and interesting; it just lands in a book that is happy to be put down.
- never ends, by design
- wants as much of your evening as it can get
- you close it foggy, with nothing to keep
- ends at camp, on purpose
- wants about five minutes, then lets you go
- you close it with a fact worth retelling
Read, play, rest
This is the whole session. No feed to fall into afterwards, no autoplay, no one more thing. Open, wander a little, close.
One chapter
A short illustrated spread with real facts, told warmly. Four minutes, maybe five.
Five questions
Quick, kind and specific. Wrong answers teach as much as right ones.
Rest at camp
Every outing ends at a campfire with a curio worth keeping. The book closes itself.
Inside the guide
Every world, its ground
each volume wears one colour, edge to edge. brush over a cover and its world peeks out.
Ask the bindery
The shelf comes stocked with ten illustrated worlds. For everything else there is the bindery: tell it what you are curious about and it writes, illustrates and binds a brand new volume on that exact subject, just for you, usually within the hour. Choose a pace of 7, 14, 21 or 28 days and the volume becomes a journey: one chapter each day, read then play.
Grow a clearing
The point of all this is time back. With your permission, PlayTime keeps a gentle ledger of the scrolling hours you reclaim, counted in about-numbers, never to the minute, and never taken away. Reclaimed hours grow a clearing and press special editions of your journal, so you can watch the habit actually change. The ledger is an iPhone feature for now.
Our promises
- No adsNothing is for sale, nobody is watching.
- No streaksMiss a day and nothing is lost. Ever.
- No strangersNo comments, no chat, no feed of other people.
- Works offlineThe whole shelf travels with you.
- Real factsChecked, specific, and told the way a favourite teacher would.
- Leave anytimeDelete your account and everything with it, from inside the app.