Why MostliHere exists
The short version of the story behind the app. A quieter phone, real-world activities, and the trap of trying to fix phones with more apps.
The longer version of how MostliHere came to be is on the about page. If you have ten minutes spare, that’s the one to read.
This is the shorter version.
The pattern
A few things were happening at once. Jonathan Haidt was publishing on teenage mental health. Daughters’ phones were going off every time something landed on Snapchat or Instagram. And anxiety levels dropped noticeably whenever the feed hours dropped.
The research on this is reasonably solid now. Constant feeds correlate with measurable anxiety across age groups. The platforms borrow their mechanics from the gambling industry, which is part of why it’s hard to put them down. Phones are loud, and most of what’s on them adds nothing to most days.
The wrong fix
The first idea was an aggregator: one quiet place instead of five loud ones.
The platforms aren’t built to let you out, though. The algorithm is the product. Ad revenue pays for the lights. Calm isn’t something those companies sell. So the aggregator idea died.
The actual fix
Sitting underneath the social-media problem was a bigger one: every way of getting organised on a phone seemed to go wrong.
One end is the blank canvas. You buy Notion so you don’t need ten apps, then you have to build the ten apps yourself, and there’s nothing special about a to-do list — it’s a date and a note. The other end is the ten apps: none of them know about each other, each does far more than you need, each pings on its own schedule, and the subscriptions stack up to thirty or forty dollars a month. The free ones take your attention and your data instead.
The middle path is most of what you actually use, already built: twenty-six small, ad-free apps under one skin, for one price, aware of each other. To-do, water, mood, habits, budget, expenses, weather, calculator, world clock, packing list, custom lists, real-world planning. All on one device. All private. All reachable from a single daily summary screen.
And there are doors in, depending on who you are: wellness, money, hyper-organised, or minimalist. Pick one; everything else stays in the Library.
That, in short, is MostliHere. The quiet is the bonus: no ads, no account, nothing leaving your phone.
The hero app
The one app inside MostliHere that’s actually a new idea, rather than a calmer version of something else you’ve seen, is Mostli Real World. It’s a planner for the activities you’d actually do with the people already in your life: a coffee, a walk, a phone call to your mum, a dinner. Plan it. Mark it. If you forget to log a day, the app assumes you lived your life.
The thesis under Mostli Real World is the thesis under the whole product. Wellness based on thousands of years of evidence in the Blue Zones; community, family, friends, nature. It isn’t complicated. Streaks and scrolling and keeping virtual pets alive don’t lower anxiety. The things that do are simple, and within reach.
What it actually looks like
The change at home is small and ordinary. One of the daughters in this story is playing guitar more, and singing. A real thing, not another doom-scroll. That’s the kind of result this product is built for.
The whole story
If you want the longer version (the Blue Zones bit, why the aggregator idea didn’t work, why MostliHere is opinionated where Notion is configurable), it’s on the about page. About five minutes.