This app will make you literally touch grass before you can doomscroll on TikTok

Spring is just around the corner, ushering in new growth, brighter days, and the heady anticipation of summer. For those of us with sizable screen time, spring’s arrival also means that the dreary weather is no longer an excuse for spending hours doomscrolling TikTok and Instagram Reels until our eyes glaze over. And now there’s an app that can help you feel like it’s spring year-round.

Rhys Kentish is a senior software engineer at the London-based app design firm Brightec. He’s spent the past four months building an app that makes users literally touch grass before they can open social media.

“I was sick and tired of my reflex in the morning being to reach for my phone and scroll for upwards of an hour,” Kentish says. “It didn’t feel good and I wasn’t getting anything out of it.” 

His solution is an app called Touch Grass, currently available for preorder and expected to debut on the App Store for iOS devices around mid-March. The app’s premise comes from a jab that gained popularity during the early pandemic, typically used to inform chronically online users that they’d become disconnected from real life.

“Touch grass [is] used when someone is doing something weird, stupid, or pointless,” according to Urban Dictionary. “It means they need to come back to reality, they need to get some fresh air and get back in touch with how the real world works.”

Kentish’s app works by allowing users to select their most distracting apps, then blocking said apps by default until the user ventures outside to touch grass. Once they take a photo of grass and submit it to the app, they can then choose the amount of time they’d like their problem apps to be unblocked. 

Currently, the app uses Google’s image-labeling Cloud Vision API to verify that the grass has, indeed, been touched. However, Kentish says, the app has gone so viral that he’s considering training his own image-detection model for cost-reduction purposes before Touch Grass makes its App Store debut.

The app’s current iteration includes a pixelated 8-bit logo and a grass-scanning screen inspired by retro sci-fi aesthetics. Kentish plans to use a freemium model to support the app, wherein subscribers can pay a fee to block unlimited apps and categories, view their screen time history, and purchase extra monthly “skips” to get around touching grass (free users get one monthly skip). According to Kentish, 50% of skip purchase profits will go toward wildlife conservation projects in the U.K. 

The proposition of the Touch Grass app is simple: Before your digital fatigue drives you to embark on a full-on social media detox, maybe just try getting some fresh air.

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