Our story
If you’re a parent today, chances are you grew up with a phone that did one thing: reach people. It hung on a wall or sat in your pocket, and when you were done talking, you were done. The phone didn’t ask for more of you. It was a tool — and then you went back to your life.
Then smartphones arrived, and honestly, they’re wonderful. Maps, homework help, photos of the grandparents, a call home from anywhere. We don’t want to take that away from our kids — a phone is how they stay safe and how we stay close.
But somewhere along the way, the phone in a kid’s pocket also became a slot machine. Feeds engineered to never end, games engineered to never let go, one more video, one more level. We watched our own kids sit at the dinner table, physically present and somewhere else entirely — and we knew it wasn’t a willpower problem. It’s a machine built by thousands of very smart adults, pointed at a ten-year-old.
What’s out there today mostly comes in two flavors: surveillance apps that read your kid’s messages and track their every move — which makes you a spy, not a parent — or Screen Time settings buried fifty taps deep, per app, per category, per schedule, that a determined kid unravels by Thursday. We didn’t want to monitor our kids. We just wanted an off switch.
Analog Mode sends a phone back to the 90s, temporarily. One tap on your phone and theirs stops being a slot machine: games, feeds, and video go quiet, while calls and texts keep working — because the point was never to cut them off from you, just from the machine. No workarounds; it holds even if the app is force-quit or the phone plays dead until Wi‑Fi comes back. Tap again and the whole modern phone returns.
Setup takes about five minutes per child. There’s no dashboard of their private life to monitor, because we don’t collect it. And when your kid outgrows it, there’s a safe, documented way to take it all off — no traps.
That’s the whole idea: keep everything a modern phone makes possible, and keep the power to turn it back into what a phone was originally for — connecting with people. Dinner, homework, sleep, a Saturday outside. Press the button, and they get to just be kids for a while.
See how it works — or write to us at [email protected]; we read everything.