An Electronic Bean That Knits Sweaters Defeats ChatGPT

In a surprising turn of events during the AI-dominated year of 2025, Google Play awarded its App of the Year to "Focus Friend", a focus timer app that once outperformed ChatGPT on iOS charts. At its core is a remarkably simple feature: an electronic bean that knits sweaters when you put down your phone.

The creator of this app, Hank Green, is an internet legend. As early as 2007, he and his brother John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars) co-created the Vlogbrothers channel, which now boasts over 3.6 million subscribers. He later founded educational channels SciShow and Crash Course, and established VidCon, the world's largest gathering for online video creators. One could say nobody understands the "attention economy" better than him.

Yet, this very master of attention economy ultimately fell victim to attention challenges. As a full-time creator spending four to five hours daily writing scripts, Green found maintaining focus increasingly difficult in today's notification-filled digital environment. When he discovered this problem plagued thousands of others, Focus Friend was born.

Unlike other focus apps on the market, Focus Friend employs a unique "companionship" design. When users activate focus mode, the little bean "Focus Bean" on screen starts knitting. If users check their phones midway, instead of punishing them like other apps would, the bean gently stops working, expressing slight disappointment with its eyes while showing the message "It's okay, we tried."

This design reflects deep behavioral psychology insights. Traditional focus apps like "Forest" use a "loss aversion" mechanism where failed focus sessions lead to virtual plants dying, which actually increases users' guilt. In contrast, Focus Friend creates a positive feedback loop: for each completed focus session, the bean displays its finished knitting products, which users can exchange for home decorations, gradually transforming the bean's empty room into a cozy home.

This mechanism cleverly utilizes the psychological principle of "Body Doubling," transforming the counter-intuitive act of self-discipline into an intuitive game of collection and construction. As one user noted: "I wanted to browse Reddit, but seeing Mr. Beano's empty room, I thought I should work another 25 minutes to buy that bookshelf for it."

While AI applications pursue higher efficiency and stronger features, Focus Friend's success offers an alternative paradigm. Without complex functions, advertisements, or even any artificial intelligence technology, it has won users' favor. This perhaps reflects a deeper social reality: in an era of computational surplus, the scarcest resource is no longer efficiency, but focus; what we need most is not a smarter assistant, but a companion to accompany us through moments of concentration. 1.https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/han...

2.https://www.businessinsider.com/hank-...