Most focus timers log your time and forget it. Quiet Orbit flies it: every focused minute moves your ship along one route of 11 worlds, Earth to Pluto. Finish a session and bring back a finding: an object, a record or a sound. You pick which apps stay blocked.
Hi Product Hunt, I'm Thien. Quiet Orbit is my first app, after almost ten years of working in the industry.
Digital wellness is a topic I've been invested in for a few years now, especially how to tackle it with my children, who'll soon be growing up with technology. This year I was inspired by the film Project Hail Mary: the journey of manoeuvring through space on your own, and the peace and quiet of it. That led to this project.
The problem is a small, common one. You know what you need to do, you have an hour, and the phone wins anyway. The timers I'd tried felt sterile and the strict blockers felt like being grounded. So Quiet Orbit is a calm focus timer for that hour: pick 15 to 90 minutes, choose which apps stay out, hold to launch. Every minute you focus moves your ship toward the next planet, eleven worlds from Earth orbit to Pluto. Finish a session and you bring back a finding from the world you reached, an object, a record or a sound, to put on display in your ship.
How it evolved: two things changed the most.
• The findings. At first they sat as objects in a room of the ship, and however they were lit they looked like stickers floating in front of the wall. I threw that out, along with the whole room. Now they light up as holograms on two projectors in the cockpit, with a six-bay display case for the rest.
• The words. A tester told me "it all sounds so intense". The app was full of space jargon, so "surveying a route" became "42% charted" and "Station-Keeping" became "Holding orbit". That pass touched 511 strings.
Most of the remaining time went into the details of a space experience. The sky in the window is real: tonight's Moon phase, the 300 brightest stars where they'd be in your direction of travel, meteor showers on their real dates. Every world has its own living window, ring shadows at Saturn, lightning at Jupiter, dust at Mars.
Free to use; Premium if you want the whole solar system. It's my entry in the RevenueCat Shipaton.
One thing I'd love to learn from you: after one session, did the route make starting easier, or was it decoration?