A product review of nothing—and why it’s the only thing that works.
The founder walks onstage with an app that refuses to perform. No confetti. No graph. Just a black screen and a vibration you can feel in your ribs, the kind you get when a plane decides to hit a cloud and everyone suddenly believes in physics again.
Off is a product that does nothing so you can do anything.
It doesn’t want engagement; it wants to vanish after working.
The only way it fails is by trying to be loved.
The app is called Off. You open it, and your phone goes quiet—no badges, no guilt, no “while you were away.” Not airplane mode. Not Do Not Disturb. A total blackout with manners. When you’re done, the world comes back, sheepish and late.
The room treats it like a prank. Investors look for the punchline. The founder says there isn’t one. “It does nothing,” they say, “so you can do anything.” A VC asks about retention. “None,” says the founder. Another asks about virality. “Please don’t share it,” says the founder, smiling like a vandal who finally found the fuse box. Someone in the back forgets to laugh.
The feature list is an apology
Off is the first app I’ve opened that didn’t try to be loved. It doesn’t promise mindfulness, productivity, or any other word you put on a hoodie. It’s not gamified. It doesn’t scoreboard your serenity. It won’t send you a push when it’s time to stop getting pushed. It will not congratulate you for leaving it alone. It is the absence of a sales pitch with a power button.
Everything we use pretends to be a long-distance relationship. “Let me ping you. Let me check in. Let me measure your heart while I borrow it.” Off doesn’t. It stands in the doorway with one question: do you want to be reachable right now? If you say no, it stops being software and starts being a room. No metrics, no memory, no “before you go.” That’s not a feature gap. That’s a boundary.
Growth without hostages
The best part of Off is how boring it would make a board meeting. No funnels. No LTV spreadsheets with numbers that look like lucky accidents. The app charges once; you own the silence. There’s no reason to A/B test the color of the “No.” There’s no reason to add a social tab. There’s nothing to juice. You can’t pivot to ads because “attention” is exactly what the product pays back.
Every modern product quietly wants to become your landlord. Off is a locksmith. You use it, you leave, you forget it exists. That’s the dream we stopped dreaming when “engagement” got rebranded as “care.” We need software that survives our forgetting.
The thing we won’t admit about time
We talk about time like money because money feels safer to lose. Time is heavier: it shows up in your throat when you realize you haven’t had an unscored hour in weeks. Off is not self-care. It’s not a glass of water after a marathon you didn’t plan to run. It’s a door that closes. It’s the authority to not be a product while you’re trying to be a person.
There’s a scene in every heist movie where someone flips the breaker and the cameras blink. That’s what Off gives you: the right to black out the panopticon without making it your new hobby. No stacks, no rituals, no identity to perform. Just darkness that’s on your side.
The terror of leaving you alone
Everyone hates Off because it doesn’t need them. Advertisers can’t live in it. Platforms can’t measure it. HR can’t mandate it as a wellness initiative. You cannot partner with a void, you can only respect it. That’s the subversion. Not the black screen. The refusal to participate in the economy of tiny obligations.
We’ve been trained to confuse a buzzing life with a full one. Off reveals the itch for what it is: a loop with no plot. Open the app, the world stops begging. Close the app, it starts again. The contrast is the reveal. It’s not that your phone is loud. It’s that your attention learned to apologize for wanting quiet.
How to fail with dignity
Here’s the only way Off could blow it: by getting ambitious. If the next update adds streaks, or “share your quiet,” or any sentence beginning with “smart,” uninstall it and never look back. The product either protects the room or invades it. There’s no third thing. Let other teams raise rounds to keep you company. Off should raise nothing but your standards.
I used it
I opened Off, and my phone fell through the floor. Outside the window, a bus argued with a pigeon about right-of-way. A neighbor watered a plant that didn’t want it. For twenty minutes I remembered how to be bored, which is to say I remembered how to choose. When I turned the world back on, it had not improved. That’s fine. Neither had I. But the day had edges again. You can live with edges. They’re what reality uses to tell you where you end and the feed begins.
