Focus Plant, made by Japan-based Shikudo, has built one of the more popular gamified blockers in this category: staying off flagged apps during a session earns "raindrops," spent to grow and collect virtual plants, with a "Strict Mode" meant to fully prevent access during that session. It's a well-liked, well-reviewed app, with a large and genuinely engaged user base by most measures, and it's worth describing its one honestly-acknowledged soft spot plainly rather than glossing over it just because the rest of the app is well built. Shikudo has continued actively updating Focus Plant with new plant species and collection events over time, which is part of why the app has sustained a large, engaged community rather than losing users to novelty fatigue after the first few months.
What Focus Plant actually does
You start a session with chosen apps blocked; staying off them earns raindrops, an in-app currency spent on growing and collecting virtual plants, with a broader collection to restore over time as you accumulate more of them. Strict Mode is meant to prevent access to blocked apps entirely during an active session, closing the simple toggle-off escape route that a plain session timer would otherwise leave open. Notably, the app itself lets users spend the same in-app currency, "suns," to whitelist an app mid-session — a feature the developers themselves discourage as undermining the whole point of Strict Mode, per the app's own design and messaging to users. The plant-collection system also includes rarer, harder-to-earn species that require sustained, consistent use over weeks to unlock, giving long-term users a reason to keep engaging with the app well beyond the first session or two.
Where Focus Plant is honestly the better pick
The plant-collection loop is genuinely well-designed gamification, not just a skin on a timer — growing and collecting an evolving world of plants gives sustained use a visual, cumulative payoff that a quiz question doesn't attempt to offer, and there's real craft in how the collection unfolds over weeks and months of use. It's also cross-platform (iOS, Mac, Android) and has a large, engaged user base, which speaks to real, sustained appeal rather than a novelty that wears off after the first few sessions. It's also worth crediting that the developers' own transparency about the currency-based workaround is itself a point in the app's favor — being upfront about a real limitation, rather than quietly hoping nobody notices it, is a better practice than many competitors in this comparison set manage.
| Feature | Focus Plant | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | iOS, Mac, Android | iOS & Android (in development) |
| Core mechanism | Gamified session blocking — earn currency for staying off flagged apps, spend it growing virtual plants | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Self-bypassable during Strict Mode? | Yes — users can spend in-app currency to whitelist a blocked app mid-session, a feature the developers themselves discourage | Not yet released — can't be assessed |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | Freemium; an optional subscription (roughly $4.99/mo, varies by region) removes ads and adds premium features | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
Focus Plant's Strict Mode has a genuine, acknowledged loophole built into the same system that's supposed to enforce it — the currency you earn for staying focused can also be spent to stop being blocked, which is a soft spot the developers themselves flag rather than hide, and it's a genuinely interesting example of a reward system quietly undermining its own stated purpose. Mr. Grummel's quiz question has no equivalent currency or workaround economy to exploit; there's no in-app purchase or earned resource that gets you through faster or easier, no matter how many sessions you've completed before. It's also worth noting this is a genuinely common pattern in gamified apps generally: any reward system valuable enough to motivate real behaviour change is also, almost by definition, valuable enough that someone will eventually try to spend it on getting out of the very behaviour it was meant to encourage.
Who should pick which
If a visual, collectible reward genuinely motivates you, and you trust yourself not to spend your way around your own Strict Mode even when a session gets genuinely hard to sit through, Focus Plant's gamification is a well-built, popular version of that idea. If you've noticed that any built-in shortcut eventually gets used, especially one your own accumulated points paid for, and you'd rather there wasn't one at all, that's the simpler, harder line Mr. Grummel takes. It's also worth trying Focus Plant specifically if a collectible, evolving world is what would keep you coming back day after day, since that kind of sustained visual motivation is hard to replicate with a text-based quiz question alone. It's also worth weighing that Focus Plant's ad-supported free tier, while functional, pushes toward the paid subscription over time, which is worth knowing going in if you'd rather not eventually feel nudged into paying for a fuller experience.