It's worth being upfront about Siempo's status before anything else: Siempo Inc., the company, dissolved in 2020 after raising roughly $1.1 million without reaching product-market fit or meaningful revenue, according to its own founders' account in a public interview. The Android launcher it built was open-sourced under the GPL afterward and now exists as a community-maintained project rather than a commercially supported product, hosted on GitHub for anyone willing to build or install it themselves without any official vendor behind it. Siempo's founders have since spoken candidly in interviews about what they learned from the company's failure, offering a rare, honest postmortem in a category where most failed products simply disappear without any public explanation at all.
What Siempo actually does
Siempo replaces your Android home screen and launcher entirely. Distracting apps are hidden off the main screen with deliberately unadorned icons, and their positions are randomized specifically to disrupt the "muscle memory" that lets you unlock and open an app on autopilot, forcing you to actually look for and recognise an icon rather than tapping a familiar spot on the screen without thinking. Scheduled "phone breathers" mute notifications for set windows, giving the whole approach a rhythm beyond just the visual redesign. It's an Android-only concept, since iOS doesn't allow full launcher replacement at the operating-system level at all. The open-source community maintaining Siempo's code has continued to accept contributions and bug fixes since the original shutdown, though release cadence and long-term support naturally can't match what a funded, actively staffed company would provide.
Where Siempo is honestly the better pick
The randomized-icon-placement idea is a genuinely clever, distinctive piece of behavioral design — disrupting the specific muscle-memory habit of reaching for an app without thinking is a different angle from a block or a question, and it's worth crediting as original thinking, whatever the company's eventual fate. If you're comfortable running community-maintained open-source software, understanding there's no vendor support behind it, and want that specific mechanism, it's genuinely free to install and try. It's also worth noting that trying Siempo costs nothing but installation time, since there's no subscription or purchase involved at all — the only real cost is accepting that nobody is answering support tickets if something breaks.
| Feature | Siempo | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Android only (launcher replacement, not possible on iOS) | iOS & Android (in development) |
| Core mechanism | Replaces the home screen; hides and randomizes the position of distracting app icons to disrupt habitual, unthinking opens | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Self-bypassable? | Yes, trivially — switching back to any other Android launcher in system settings removes it entirely; no enforcement layer exists | Not yet released — can't be assessed |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | Free (open source); the original company is dissolved, so there's no commercial tier or vendor support | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
Siempo's mechanism is about disrupting habit formation at the interface level — making the reflex of opening an app harder to execute without thought, by hiding and shuffling icons so the automatic motion no longer lands where you expect. That's a genuinely different theory of change from Mr. Grummel's, which doesn't try to interrupt the reflex before it starts, but instead puts a real cost after you've already decided to open the app and found it despite the shuffled layout. Siempo also isn't enforced in any way — a launcher swap back removes it completely, in seconds, through a standard Android settings menu — where Mr. Grummel's question has to actually be answered every single time regardless of how the app itself is presented. It's also worth adding that habit-disruption approaches like Siempo's tend to lose effectiveness once a user adapts to the new layout, since muscle memory can eventually re-form around a randomized system just as it did around the original one, given enough repeated exposure.
Who should pick which
If you're on Android, comfortable with community-maintained open-source software and its lack of official support, and specifically want to disrupt the muscle-memory habit of unlocking your phone without thinking, Siempo's randomized-icon idea is a real, if unsupported, tool for that specific job. If you want something actively maintained that stops you after you've already reached for the app, with a company actually standing behind ongoing updates, that's the more direct, more currently-supported role Mr. Grummel is built to play. It's also worth weighing that a defunct company means no future updates as Android itself evolves, which is a real risk for long-term reliability that a currently maintained product like Mr. Grummel doesn't carry in the same way. It's also worth remembering that Siempo's core insight — that muscle memory, not conscious choice, drives a lot of reflexive phone use — is a genuinely useful idea worth taking seriously even by someone who ultimately picks a different, more actively enforced tool.