Why we didn't build another phone

Every few years someone announces the cure for the smartphone: a new phone that does less. One that only calls and texts. A slab of e-ink with the colour taken out. A "minimal" phone with half the features removed on purpose. We looked hard at all of them when we started Manna, and we kept coming back to the same thought: the phone was never the problem.

Think about what's in your pocket. A very good camera. Every map. Every song. Every book you mean to get round to. The fastest way to tell someone you're outside, you're running late, you love them. A studio, a library, a boarding pass, a metronome, a torch. It's the most capable object most of us will ever own, it fits in a jacket, and Apple has sold more than three billion of them.

So building a replacement never made sense to us. The iPhone is already close to perfect for the lives we live, and a phone that does less doesn't give you your evening back. It just takes your camera and your maps with it. You end up with less of everything, including the good parts.

The problem is the aim

What goes wrong isn't the hardware. It's the default. You pick the phone up for one thing and the feed is waiting, built by very good engineers to make one more minute feel like nothing. Nobody decides to spend an evening that way. It's just the easiest way through the evening, and it's been made very easy.

So Manna changes the default, not the phone. You choose what you want to do (read, run, cook, work, sit at the dinner table) and tap Start. With your permission, the apps you picked are blocked through Apple's Screen Time, enforced by iOS itself, until the mode's time is up or you end it. Everything else keeps working: the camera, the maps, the music, the people who need to reach you.

That's the whole idea. Same phone. Better aim.

Why it matters that it's the phone

Because it's already there. The best tool is the one you have with you, and you always have this one. There's nothing new to buy and nothing to remember to bring. The moment you think "I should really go for that run" is the moment Manna can help, because the phone is already in your hand.

And because the phone can do things no gadget can. It can start your tennis mode at seven on a Saturday because that's when you said you play. It can show you, honestly, how many hours you spent on the court this month. It can sit on your Lock Screen and count down the last twenty minutes of a work block. A dumb phone can't do any of that. All it can do is less.

We think the phone is one of the best things ever made. It deserves to be used like it.