Smoor

We make the quiet kind. Technology should leave us alone to do things better. That’s the idea.

The phone is where we’re starting. Somewhere along the way it stopped being one thing. There’s the phone you bought — messages, the camera, the map that gets you home. And there’s the other one, layered invisibly on top: the one built by people whose job is to keep you looking, and who are remarkably good at it. You reach for the first and end up holding the second. An hour disappears. You know the feeling.

We tried the usual remedies and didn’t much like any of them. The blockers treat you as a problem to be policed — friction, lockouts, a small jolt of shame when you slip. The minimalist launchers are mostly a calm wallpaper over a phone that’s still fully loaded underneath. None of it was the point. We didn’t want to be punished into using our phones less, or tricked into it. We wanted the phone to go quiet when we asked, and come back when we were done.

So we’re building Smoor.

It’s an old Scots word. To smoor a fire is to bank it down for the night — not to put it out, but to settle it, raking the embers under the ash so they hold their heat until morning. People did it every evening. In some houses it came with a blessing. That’s the feeling we’re after: you aren’t destroying anything or quitting anything. You’re settling it for a while.

In use it’s simple. You quiet the noise and keep what matters. When you’re done, everything comes back — nothing lost, nothing out of place. It’s not about going without your phone. It’s about the phone getting out of the way.

We’re building it for ourselves first, because it’s the phone we want in our pockets every evening. It’s coming to iPhone.

Smoor keeps as little as it can. Read our privacy policy.