Otso — pause before you scroll

karlex

In-app purchases

About this app

Otso puts a small pause between you and the apps you get caught in.

You choose which apps. Otso does nothing to any app you did not pick.

When you open one of them, Otso steps in front for a moment. Sometimes it just waits with you and counts. Sometimes it asks what you came to do. Sometimes it asks you to type one short sentence. Then it gets out of the way and you decide.

Otso almost never says no. The pause is friction, not a wall — there is always a way through, because a wall you cannot pass is a wall you will uninstall. The one exception is evening quiet, and that one has no continue button. You set it in advance, when you are calm, rather than in the moment when you would want to bargain with it.

WHAT IT DOES

• A short pause in front of the apps you chose
• Four kinds of pause, varied so they stay noticeable
• You can name what you came to do, or skip the question
• Choose a length for the visit: 2, 5 or 15 minutes
• Time ranges: keep Otso on all the time, or only during the hours you set
• Evening quiet: the one hard stop, off by default
• A count of your opens today, and how many times you turned back

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

• No account. There is nothing to sign up for.
• No server. Otso has no backend, and the app makes no network calls at all.
• No tracking, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party code watching you.
• Nothing is uploaded. Your chosen apps, your schedules and your daily counts stay on your phone and are deleted with the app.
• No streaks, no scores, no shaming. Otso does not congratulate you for a good day or scold you for a bad one. It counts, and that is all.
• No comparing yourself to other people. That would need a server, and there is not one.
• No ads, ever. You pay once, and that is the whole arrangement.

WHAT IT COSTS

Otso is free for seven days, with everything switched on. After that a single payment unlocks it for good. No subscription, no recurring charge, and nothing to cancel.

WHY A BEAR

Otso is an old Finnish name for the bear. The name was used so you did not have to say the real one out loud. It seemed right for an app about the thing you keep doing without naming it.

PERMISSIONS

Otso needs to know which app is in front, so it can tell when you open one you chose. That is the usage access permission, granted in Android settings.

It needs to draw over other apps, because the pause has to appear on top of the app you are opening.

It runs a foreground service so the phone does not put it to sleep. You will see a quiet notification while Otso is on.

Otso never reads the contents of any app. It sees which app is open, nothing inside it.

Requires Android 8.0 or later.

What’s new

Otso now speaks 39 languages. The app itself and the store listing were both translated, so the pause, the questions and Otso's own lines appear in your phone's language.

Nothing else changed. Same app, same one-time price, still no account and no server.