Perchi vs Focus Friend: the bean on your phone or the friend on your desk?

Focus Friend is a gamified focus timer by Hank Green and Honey B Games. You set a timer, a cartoon bean knits socks while you work, and the socks become currency for decorating a room; leave early and the bean is interrupted. It hit number one on the US App Store after its August 2025 launch and won Google Play's App of the Year 2025. On the day we checked, the US App Store showed 4.8 stars from 7.1K ratings and Google Play 4.9 stars from 10.3K reviews with over a million installs.

The core is free. Pro costs $3.99 a month, $19.99 a year or $39.99 lifetime (₹399, ₹1,999 and ₹3,999 on the Indian App Store), and removes the 120-minute cap on free sessions. Deep Focus mode blocks other apps. Reviewers love that it is cute, non-judgmental and free of nagging notifications; guilt, it turns out, works better than punishment.

The complaints: the two-hour free cap, Deep Focus bugs when other focus apps are installed, decorating that completes too quickly, and what one guide calls the ADHD app paradox: once the app closes you forget it exists.

Focus Friend lives inside the very device you are trying to avoid. To start a session you unlock the phone, open the app and set a timer, three steps that pass through the lock screen, the notifications and the feed. To see the bean you open the phone again. Out of sight, it is out of mind, which is the paradox users describe. Perchi is never out of sight: it sits on the desk, the phone rests on it, and the face and the project are visible the whole time.

Perchi (₹2,999) turns the thing you already do when you sit down, putting the phone down, into the start of the session. Rest the phone on its back and after a 3-second ring a 25-minute block starts (5 to 120 minutes, up to four presets). Perchi knits a scarf, grows a sprout or builds a tower in five visible stages beside its face while the phone stays down. Lift it and Perchi pauses with a look; put it back within the grace period and it carries on. How Phone Nap works has every rule in order.

The finished projects go into a wardrobe in the dashboard with the date and block length, streaks earn a freeze every seven days, and daily and weekly report cards show minutes, blocks and the longest block. Perchi also reacts to real events from 60+ integrations, something no focus app does: a sale, a new subscriber or a green build shows up as a moment beside the face.

Focus Friend's bean is sad if you quit early, and Forest's trees die. Perchi is never punitive. Lifting the phone pauses the project; it never unravels. A block that ends early is recorded as partial and every finished stage stays finished; a block stopped with zero stages is simply cancelled, with no sad face. A missed day is frozen automatically once you have earned a freeze. The disappointed look is the whole consequence, and it is enough.

Focus Friend is free if the 120-minute cap suits you. Pro at $19.99 a year is about $60 over three years, or $39.99 (₹3,999 in India) once for lifetime. Perchi is ₹2,999 once, including GST, with no tiers, no cap and no in-app purchases; the dashboard, apps and firmware updates are included. See Pricing. The honest comparison is that Focus Friend costs nothing to try and Perchi is a piece of hardware you reserve; the two also work together, because Perchi never touches your phone's software.