A $59 Gadget, or a Dollar's Worth of NFC
If you have ever wished you spent less time staring at your phone, you have probably run across Brick, a small device that sells for around $59 and promises to put a physical obstacle between you and the apps that swallow your evenings. The pitch is straightforward: choose the apps you want to avoid, then tap your handset against the Brick to lock them down. Getting back in means standing up, walking to wherever the Brick happens to be sitting, and tapping it again.
Writing for Wired's Gear section in September 2026, Justin Pot makes the case that the idea behind Brick is genuinely good, and that it has been implemented in a way that makes getting started easy. But the hardware itself is doing nothing exotic. A Brick is essentially an NFC chip — the same short-range wireless technology already embedded in your credit card or your passport. Blank NFC tags sell for roughly a dollar. And free applications will happily use those tags, or a printed QR code, to run the exact same kind of blocking session.
Pot's conclusion is blunt: you do not need to buy a chunk of plastic to get the benefit.
Why Friction Is the Whole Point
Distraction-blocking tools are not really about willpower. They are about engineering a delay.
Every step you insert between an impulse and a reward gives the deliberate part of your brain a chance to catch up. Putting an app behind a passcode helps a little. Putting it behind a physical object that lives in another room helps considerably more, because the cost of giving in is no longer a single tap — it is a walk, a search, and a decision made while standing up.
That is the mechanic Brick sells. It is also the mechanic that free software can reproduce on its own, because the expensive part of the product was never the software. It was the plastic puck.
There is a second advantage to the do-it-yourself route: you choose the trigger. A tag can live in a drawer, a QR code can be taped inside a cabinet, and a barcode can be printed on nothing at all because the item you scan is already sitting in your kitchen.
Foqos: The Best Free Pick for iPhone
Foqos is a free, open source iOS app built by Canadian developer Ali Waseem. Pot notes that open source projects often lack polish, and that this one is an exception: configuring the necessary permissions, creating a profile, and switching on a block are all simple tasks.
Four ways to start and stop a session
- NFC tags. Tap a cheap tag to begin or end a block. The app even includes a link to buy a set of them if you do not already own any.
- QR codes. Print a code and tape it somewhere inconvenient. All you need is a printer.
- A daily schedule. For blocks that should simply begin at a set time without any physical trigger at all.
- Any barcode. Scan the code on a favorite book, a beverage can, or anything else you keep around the house. Nothing to buy, nothing to print.
Built to resist the person who set it up
The most interesting design decision in Foqos is defensive. While a profile is running, the app prevents you from managing apps. That closes the obvious escape hatch: you cannot simply delete the blocker in a moment of weakness to get around a block that you configured yourself earlier in the day. For anyone negotiating with their own impulses, that is the difference between a suggestion and a lock. If you want a safety valve, the app will let you permit a limited number of breaks.
What it feels like in practice
Pot tested the app against his own Reddit habit and reports that it works. His setup is deliberately unglamorous: a printed QR code kept inside a cabinet, far away from the couch where he tends to scroll. The distance supplies just enough friction that he can settle into a book instead of a feed. Notably, his barrier is not a gadget at all — it is a piece of paper in the wrong room.
Privacy
Pot also singles out the app's privacy policy as excellent, noting that no data leaves your device. For a tool that necessarily monitors which apps you open and when, that matters more than it might for other categories of software.
Switchly: The Android Recommendation
Foqos is iOS-only, and Pot could not locate an Android equivalent that matches it for polish. The Android pick he lands on is Switchly. The same underlying principle still applies — a free app paired with a physical trigger you control — even if the finish is not quite as refined as the iPhone option. Android users who want the full effect should expect to spend a few extra minutes in setup and configuration rather than getting a frictionless out-of-the-box experience. The trade remains a good one: a little time against the price of a dedicated device.
Building Your Own System
If you want to assemble a version of this for yourself, the process is short:
- Pick the apps that actually cost you time. Be specific. Blocking everything usually collapses under its own weight within a day.
- Choose a trigger. An NFC tag costs about a dollar, a printed QR code costs nothing but paper, and a barcode already exists on objects in your home.
- Put the trigger somewhere inconvenient. The whole system depends on distance. A tag in your pocket defeats the purpose; a QR code inside a cabinet across the room does not.
- Close the escape routes. Use an app that blocks you from disabling it mid-session, and decide in advance whether you want any breaks at all.
- Keep the barrier boring. The less interesting the object, the less likely you are to fiddle with it instead of the app you were trying to avoid.
The Trade-offs
Free and open source does not mean identical. Commercial hardware like the Brick arrives with an app that is already paired to it, a setup flow that has been tested on thousands of buyers, and customer support when something breaks. A dollar NFC tag plus a free app asks you to configure permissions, create profiles, and troubleshoot the occasional mismatch yourself.
There are also limits on how far any of this scales. Physical friction works because it interrupts a habit loop at a specific moment. It will not help if the phone itself is the problem, or if the app you need to block also happens to be the app you need for work. And a schedule-based block is the weakest of the four trigger options precisely because it requires nothing physical at all.
The Bottom Line
The strongest argument here is not about saving $59. It is that the physical-friction technique, which is genuinely effective, has been treated as a hardware feature when it is really a software capability wrapped around a component you can buy for pocket change. A chip that costs a dollar, a QR code that costs a sheet of paper, and a free app that refuses to let you cheat are enough to interrupt a doomscrolling habit.
The gadget is a convenience, not a requirement. And as Pot's own experiment shows, the barrier does not need to be clever. It only needs to be far enough away that you have to think about it.
This article is based on reporting by Wired. Read the original article.
Originally published on wired.com
