Make offline normal again
About Mona Offline
Mona Offline is an app for Android and iPhone that puts your phone offline by default. Offline is where your phone starts, rather than a short break or a punishment. If you want to go online, you dial in. And just like in the old days, that takes a moment.
The ritual
You tap "Dial in". A real modem handshake plays, about sixteen seconds of screeching and hissing, exactly the way a dial-up modem sounded in the nineties. Then CONNECT 14400 appears, with the question of how long you want to be online: three, seven or thirty minutes. You choose, the timer runs, and when the time is up the line drops with NO CARRIER. Your phone is offline again. After that there is a short wait before you can dial in once more.
Those sixteen seconds are not loading time. There is nothing to speed up, because they are the product. They give you room to ask yourself what you actually came to do.
Why friction is the point
Most of the moments when we reach for our phone happen without a decision. It is a reflex: a dead moment, a hand already moving, and ten minutes later you no longer know why you started. Apps are built so that the reflex pays off.
You can put a lock on that, but hard blockers work until they hurt, and then they get deleted. Mona takes a different route. The threshold is low enough to step over whenever you really want something, and high enough to interrupt the reflex. Nothing is forbidden. You are just asked whether you mean it.
That is also why Mona is never strict or preachy. There are no points, no badges, no streaks you can break and no notifications that call you back. The app only shows how often you dialed in. People get used to warnings, but not to seeing themselves.
What stays reachable
Offline is wonderful until your bank, your navigation or your messages are gone at the wrong moment. That is why Mona has a list of apps that stay reachable, even when the line is closed. You put that list together yourself: your messaging app, your bank, your transit app, your maps. Anything on that list never notices the block.
On Android the block works through a local VPN connection. Local means literally local: there is no server, your traffic goes nowhere, and nothing is inspected or stored. The connection exists only so that your phone can be put offline.
On iPhone and iPad, Mona uses no VPN, because Apple does not allow one for this kind of app. There, Mona puts the apps you choose behind the dial tone using the Screen Time features of iOS. The difference is the direction: on Android you choose which apps stay reachable, on iPhone you choose which apps go behind the line. So your bank and your maps never go down there, unless you put them behind it yourself.
What Mona is not
No productivity app with charts you have to beat. No digital detox in ten steps. No subscription you cancel and then forget about.
And no unbreakable lock. Anyone who wants to switch the app off can do so. That is a deliberate choice: software that holds you hostage gets thrown away. Mona wants to be the app you keep, and that only works if having it around is not annoying.
Where it comes from
Mona Offline is made by tivity B.V. in Amsterdam. The app is in a closed test, on Android and on iPhone, with a small group of users who use it every day and tell us honestly what is wrong with it. What they report decides what gets built.
The app is free and free of advertising, with no ad network and no tracker in it. What little data does leave your phone, and it really is little, is on the privacy page.
Want to take part or ask something? You can do that through the contact page or directly at hello@monaoffline.com.