Slowtech revolution aims to cure phone addiction and save your focus

When Tony Fadell stepped into New York City’s 28th Street Subway Station, the last thing he expected to see was a poster for a product he helped create more than two decades ago. Yet there it was: a five-foot by four-foot advertisement for the iPod Shuffle, enticing commuters with the slogan “Zero screen time.”

“The first thing was, I thought, ‘Wait a second, did somebody not change the ad?’” Fadell, widely recognized as the father of the iPod, told TechCrunch. “For somebody like me who knows that thing intimately, it’s like seeing your kid’s picture.”

Standing in the station, Fadell was surrounded by people wearing wireless Bluetooth headphones, streaming music from phones that hold over 100 million songs. The technology we now take for granted makes Steve Jobs’ original iPod tagline , “one thousand songs in your pocket” , feel almost quaint.

The tiny iPod Shuffle, which relied heavily on random playback and offered minimal control compared to modern streaming apps, shouldn’t appeal to today’s audience. But we’ve become so immersed in technology that our devices, apps, and algorithms now mediate nearly every experience, from buying groceries to finding a partner. We’ve built smartphones capable of almost anything, yet this constant connectivity has become more draining than rewarding.

“People are very oversaturated and overstimulated, and they really want to have a more mindful approach to what they’re doing with their tech,” said Joy Howard, CMO of Back Market, an online marketplace for refurbished electronics. “There’s this fatigue that we have with the need to optimize every single aspect of our life.”

Howard and her team created the iPod Shuffle ad that so startled Fadell. But she insists that demand for this seemingly obsolete tech is real. If these devices weren’t driving sales, the company wouldn’t have paid for a premium ad spot in a chaotic New York subway.

For younger generations who have never known life without social media and smartphones, there is a certain appeal to wired headphones, retro gaming consoles, CDs, and digital point-and-shoot cameras. They want experiences that don’t try to monopolize their attention. Old-school cameras can’t upload directly to Instagram. Retro games don’t bombard you with gambling ads. And iPods won’t algorithmically select music for you. That is the core of this movement, which Howard calls “slowtech.”

“The ‘fast tech’ up until now has been all about eliminating friction,” Howard explained. “Now, people are seeing friction as a way to create boundaries for themselves. It’s so stunning to me that now people are wanting to bring friction back into their lives, and see that as a feature, rather than a flaw.”

Around the same time Fadell pitched the iPod to Steve Jobs, Austin Murray co-founded JAMDAT, one of the first mobile gaming companies. It quickly went public and was sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million.

“When we were pitching our company back in 2000, 2001, people were laughing at us, saying, ‘Why would anyone play games on their cell phone?’” Murray told TechCrunch.

Now, investors react with similar disbelief when he pitches them on his screen-time reduction app, MOQA. He is building it to counteract the very phenomenon he helped create.

“It’s watching what happened to my kids and the people around me that hurts my soul the most,” Murray said. “When everyone is doing the same thing , meaning everyone, the average screen time is like five hours probably on a phone every day , it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.”

This desire to cut back on phone, computer, and TV usage has become widespread. About 53% of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time.

“At a certain point, I realized that willpower was insufficient to not waste time on my phone,” said writer Calvin Kasulke, author of “Several People Are Typing,” a novel about workers trapped inside a Slack workspace. He now pays for Opal and Freedom, two apps designed to limit his screen time and social media use. “I don’t need to limit my time on iMessage , that’s people who I really know! But I certainly don’t want to be wasting my time doomscrolling.”

Kasulke added, “I want to be very clear… I don’t feel smug about this. It’s embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this. I don’t think screens are inherently bad. I just think the way I was using [my phone] was worse and dumb, and now it’s a little bit less dumb.”

Others have abandoned their iPhones entirely, opting for flip phones, e-ink devices running Android, or minimalist hardware like the Light Phone.

“Our customers for the last 10 years are telling us how they feel more free after switching to the Light Phone,” co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “It’s getting more and more attention, especially among young people. We have quite a lot of the community using Light Phone as 20- to 35-year-olds, which surprised us.”

Murray is less optimistic about the future of “dumb phones,” however.

“There’s certainly a movement of people who are just kind of anti-tech and ‘get it out of our lives,’” he said. “That’s really hard though, because then you realize you can’t do things that are now assuming you have a smartphone, like banking, or going into a hotel, or [using] credit cards.”

Kasulke said if Apple ever made an e-ink iPhone, he would “f–ing donate plasma to be able to afford it.” But that seems unlikely, so he is not interested in downgrading his phone.

“I’m not like a, ‘I wish I could throw this thing in the toilet and go live in the woods’ kind of guy,” Kasulke said. “My phone has some utility for my personal and professional life, but it also lives in your pocket, and it is very, very easy, and in fact, designed in some ways to be addictive and to mindlessly waste time on it.”

Screen time is not universally harmful. We accumulate screen time when we video chat with family, text friends, read news, maintain Duolingo streaks, or play Wordle. But for all the ways tech brings us closer, it also pulls us away from the present moment.

“It’s clear people want the convenience of digital, but they don’t want the annoyance of being always connected,” Fadell said. “I’ve always been like, ‘We need less screens, not more of them.’ So to have an Apple Watch with everything, like, no, no, no , I don’t want more, I want less.”

It is no surprise that Fadell’s preferences signal market trends. He is a veteran product designer. American spending on fitness trackers grew 88% year-over-year, according to market research firm Circana. The firm credits screenless wearables like the Oura ring and Whoop wristband as key sales drivers. Even though these devices lack screens, users must still rely on a smartphone to view their data. That makes it even harder for Oura and Whoop users to switch to something like the Light Phone.

Most consumers are not looking for such an extreme change. Instead, some are embracing more sophisticated hardware that depends on their smartphone but reduces overall screen time.

Mark, a $159 AI bookmark, markets itself as a tool to help users stop pulling out their phone to take notes while reading. Some might see an AI bookmark as part of the same problem driving people toward digital detox. Founder Eason Tang disagrees.

“The way we try to brand it now is this sort of analog tool, very culturally integrated with design, film, books, and literature,” Tang told TechCrunch.

There is something undeniably absurd about using an AI bookmark to manage your relationship with your phone. Yet Tang’s pitch holds some truth. When you stop reading to take notes or snap a photo of a key passage, you are likely to encounter a distracting notification that interrupts your focus.

Though AI developments are almost synonymous with “fast tech” culture, there is clear appeal in the promise that AI agents could simplify our lives and give us more time away from screens.

“I think that this idea that people want tools to serve them and not to dominate them is very profound,” Howard said. “I think what the ‘slowtech’ movement is about is people pushing back against the constant digital fatigue, distraction, overwhelm, so if you can use AI to do that, to kind of protect yourself… That’s what people want: more control.”

The ubiquity of AI turns some consumers off from the latest products. But that is not their only grievance with big tech. People are also disillusioned by companies that continually brick perfectly good hardware just to push the latest model. Back Market, for example, refurbishes discontinued laptops and sells them with USB keys that install ChromeOS Flex, turning supposedly obsolete hardware into functional Chromebooks.

“One of our developers started finding a way to hack things that had their OS sunsetted to bring it new life. And so one of the first things he hacked was a rice cooker,” Howard said. “His rice cooker didn’t have support anymore! This is actually a really cool use of AI , like, vibe coding your own app to keep your hardware alive longer.”

Slowtech adherents may not all agree about AI use. But that debate is secondary to the larger problem. We have created an ecosystem where we are so dependent on smartphones and apps that the whims of the tech industry can control how we cook rice. In this reality, it is no wonder people are so eager to disconnect that they would consider downgrading to an iPod Shuffle.

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention,” Howard said. “They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”