What I learned from a strange new app that tries something different to get you off your phone

A few weeks ago, I came across a viral tweet from journalist and cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet about how she had downloaded an app on her phone that opened the front camera every time she went to watch TikTok. Drolet described this feature, intended as a deterrent to mindless movement, as “so violent.” Her evidence of the brutality was an image of a blurry photo of her, somewhat disheveled, with messy hair, eating a cookie-like dessert. Violent, indeed, from her point of view, but also deeply relatable – it’s not like I start TikTok because I’m choosing to be a participant in society. No, I click it when I’m at my most pleasant, boring, eat-in-pajamas-for-breakfast time.

Ironically, I discovered, when I looked into this further, that this “violent” app, One Sec, actually promotes a more peaceful method of forcing yourself to disconnect (or, rather, NO enter). Of course, there are other anti-distraction mobile apps, like AppBlock; Freedom, a multi-device website blocking app; and RescueTime, a time blocker and tracker. One Sec’s uniqueness lies in the fact that, in the most basic form of the app, it adds a time delay and prompts you to take a deep breath before opening a specific app. Then ask if you really want to spend the next few hours watching a stream of funny videos interrupted every five minutes by commercials.

Deep breaths, intention – this is all wonderful. But while the attention seems to be a marketing ploy, the camera function Drolet encountered proved to me that the One Sec at least flirts with ferocity. There’s only one real emotional lever an app shows you how you look when you’re trying to attract input, and it’s a shame.

I’d like to think I have a healthier relationship with social media than I used to, but I just Instagrammed a backless bra that’s actually supposed to work. really, I still feel like a pawn in Big Tech’s algorithmic game. I wanted to know if breaking my vanity was the only thing I needed to do to rid myself of these tempting time killers. So, I grabbed my Android phone, prayed that the One Sec app existed for non-Apple users (yes, but in beta), hit download, and waited for boredom to get the better of me.

I was faced with several issues immediately: First, as far as I could tell – although no amount of research and reading made me sure—is that One Sec’s beta Android app doesn’t have the feature that opens the front camera. Does not matter! With some insatiable googling, I learned how to set up a task automation app to make it so that when One Sec is activated, my front camera opens and takes a photo. (While writing this post, I reached out to the One Sec support team to see if there was an easier way to do this that I had missed, but did not hear back by the time of publication.) Next, I logged into One Sec and told it which apps I wanted it to block—Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), and the New York Times Games app to start. In order for One Sec to interact with multiple apps, you have to pay for a premium subscription, so (for science!) I begrudgingly handed over my $3 a month and got to work.

The first little square I clicked to try out the new setup was Instagram, with the resulting photo highlighted below. In the grand scheme of things, what I saw staring back at me was not terrible, but, dear reader, it was offensive. Not because of my face, of course, but because of One Sec’s weirdest feature: it shows you not mirror-image version of yourself. Bleh. Of course, this is a disclaimer that the photos you see here are reflected in the post, because I already know that my face is slightly skewed (as is most everyone’s) and I don’t need Al Gore’s internet proof left for posterity . (Also, this is a general warning that what I experienced in the beta version of this Android app may not be how it works on Apple devices.)

There was another downside to my experience: Unlike Drolet from X’s completely wild example, my app didn’t display a word-on-picture overlay showing (read: punishing me) how many times I’d opened an app in the last 24 hours . Instead, when I went to, say, select the Wordle of the day, my phone would open the front-facing camera, take a photo, show a popup telling me how many times I’d tried to open NYT Games, then ask me if I wanted to continue.

Instagram was the first app I disabled in One Sec, after reaching 12 opens in one day. That sounds like a lot, but in my defense, I do DM my friends quite a bit on Instagram and Twitter. Although checking the message leads to mindless movement, it is imperative that I see any meme or Knives out The announcement about the cast members was sent to me by my friends.

But after I decided to allow myself unlimited Instagram, One Sec was still slowing me down when it came to Twitter, TikTok, and puzzles. The first few times my front camera was triggered to open, I mostly saw myself from the ugly bottom corner with a double chin (not mirrored), mostly getting confused. Yeah, I couldn’t say that at all. It made me realize that while some have whore faces on vacation, I have to rest “WTF?” face

My biggest “WTF”? the face happened in my NYT games for the third time it started with jump. After solving Wordle the first step and taking an initial crack at Connections the second, I went back to finish the job. (Actually, I was able to immediately identify Tablecloths, Pitcher, Skull, and Fruit as classic still life iconography. Yes, I honestly wish I was cooler than that.)

Soon after, I deactivated Twitter from One Sec after being annoyingly stopped a number of times extremely early while trying to catch up on too much late news. The challengers fan edits and funny tweets about the movies my closest friends had sent me that day. Pictured here: my seventh opening of the day. Don’t I look like I can’t believe this annoying hellscape is my life?

I quickly configured One Sec to only track TikTok since then. My TikTok consumption has greatly improved, and by that I mean decreased, since quarantine. Nowadays, I go from time to time to analyze the videos that my friends have sent me. Inbox TikTok is the ultimate TikTok interaction—it’s like having your own curated scrolling experience with content you’re sure to love. But once I got back from vacation, I had over 300 TikToks waiting for me in my inbox. I had quit my job this weekend.

This, possibly the most uncomfortable but hilarious picture taken during this time, was me opening the “clock app” (as the kids call it) wiping the morning sleep from my eyes.

And I then went out to meet someone in town, STILL trying to deplete my supply of ‘Toks’.

Why was I so bad at keeping One Sec in my apps? My resolve faded early on when I encountered one of the app’s most useful and annoying effects, which is that even if you click away from an app for a short time to, say, send a message to someone, it records that you return by opening the application. again from the beginning. I guess that’s part of the lesson? But it’s annoying. After learning about this wrinkle early on in my One Sec journey, I tried to focus only on TikTok while I was at it. Usually, I roll into a pattern that might look something like this: checking Instagram, texting my mom about that one thing I forget to ask, going back to Instagram, listening to a song I like, looking for on Spotify, Googling the artist, clicking on the Instagram profile that comes up as a Google result, which brings me back to scrolling on Instagram. A second, with or without the camera function I added, broke this flow. I caught the moment when I realized I messed up by exiting TikTok to message a video to someone and had to “take a deep breath” and take a picture before continuing.

As I scrolled through the rest of the social media over the weekend, I noticed that I began to wait for the photo and even began to pose (still unhappily) for the impending revelation of myself.

And just like that, the spell of my own embarrassing jump scare was extinguished by the only thing it was trying to hack: my vanity.

Although One Sec was still effective as a pop-up that requires you to do little more than simply press a button to remove it, I was surprised by its willingness to adapt to my vaults. When I first saw Drolet’s tweet, I thought the camera feature idea was incredibly clever. However, it took me less than three days of using One Sec to start anticipating the launch of the camera every time I opened TikTok and start treating it as a reward instead of a punishment. Maybe I adapted because society forces us to be camera-ready at all times, or because I’m vain, or because nothing was going to stop me from accessing the apps I wanted to access, not even my ghastly appearance. Or maybe it’s just that there’s not much I wouldn’t go through to follow a fake, but cute, TikTok love triangle going forward the eyes.