What's new in Focen.
Focen is in active beta and improving every week. Here's what has shipped.
v0.8.1
LatestAugust 27, 2026- Focen checks for a new version every few hours instead of only when it starts. It launches when you log in and lives in the menu bar, so it rarely restarts, and 0.8.0 reached nobody who did not quit it by hand.
- Opening something distracting after a long stretch of work now ends the session and goes back to watching, instead of flashing at you and putting the tab away. An hour in, that is you finishing, not you slipping.
- Before that point Focen asks whether you are done. On Strict it never could: it put the distraction away after about a minute and sent you back to work, which reset the count it was waiting on.
- You can set when Focen asks, and when it stops asking, under More settings. Left alone they show what Focen has learned from your own sessions.
v0.8.0
August 26, 2026- Fifteen minutes means fifteen minutes. If you raised how long Focen waits before starting a session, it was starting at a third of that: a session set to 15 minutes began at 5.
- The break reminder no longer goes off when you open a closed laptop. It had been counting the time the machine was asleep as time you had been working.
- A session can no longer run past twelve hours. One had run for twenty-seven, because nothing anywhere put a limit on it.
- Your iPhone shields itself when you are using it, rather than when a timer runs out. It decides that on the phone, so it holds with Focen backgrounded, closed, or offline.
- Drifting on your Mac now reaches your phone. It never did, so on the balanced and lenient settings a phone that was not open could never learn to lock itself.
- Ending is one tap on your phone once a session has run long enough, and the question Focen asks on the Mac is asked on the phone too. Answering it in either place settles it in both.
- Opening your Mac while a session is running on your phone no longer locks your screen straight away.
- Only one copy of Focen can run at a time.
- Focen keeps a log file now. It had been writing to somewhere that discarded every line, which made a whole class of problem impossible to look into afterwards.
v0.7.0
August 20, 2026- AI classification now actually runs during your trial and on the AI plan. It was off unless you found the toggle in Settings, which meant the paid feature had never run for anybody. Turning it off still works and still sticks.
- Focen starts when you log in. It lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon, so after a restart there was nothing on screen to bring it back. There is a switch for it in Settings.
- If macOS is blocking Focen from reading your browser, it says so and takes you to the right settings pane. Before, it just quietly stopped catching anything.
- At the end of a session Focen tells you how many sites it did not recognise, so you can see what it had no opinion about.
- A session can no longer come back from the dead: a heartbeat that lands after you end one no longer restarts it, and a crash you recover from quickly is repaired properly.
- Onboarding no longer promises an iPhone app you cannot install yet.
v0.6.0
August 19, 2026- Focen now judges the last few minutes rather than the site in front of you. YouTube open beside your editor, cycling between them, is research; YouTube on its own is not. Same site, opposite answers.
- A distracting site you are genuinely working alongside stops being blocked for the rest of that session, and goes back to normal in the next one.
- Sessions can start on the pattern instead of a stopwatch, so real work is recognised in about ninety seconds instead of five minutes.
- Focen notices when you have stopped. Under 45 minutes it says nothing, up to 90 it asks, and past that it just ends the session and tells you what you worked.
- You can mark a single page as work without whitelisting the whole site.
- The break reminder can be turned off, and is off by default.
- Research mode is gone. Unfamiliar sites are left alone all the time now, which is what it promised to do.
- A session can no longer keep running on your phone after the desktop has closed.
- Quitting mid-session no longer erases that session from your history.
- A session paused on Friday no longer comes back on Monday.
v0.5.1
July 23, 2026- The count of how many sites and apps you classify (a number tied to your account, never which ones) now applies on every plan, including free. It is for product metrics only.
v0.5.0
July 22, 2026- New privacy control, off by default: you can help improve Focen by anonymously sharing which sites and apps get classified. What is shared is a category only, like “example.com is a distraction,” with no link to you, your account, your device, or your IP.
- Signup now shows a clear line linking the Privacy Policy and Terms, plus separate, unchecked opt-ins for product emails and for anonymized sharing. Nothing is pre-checked.
- On the AI plan, Focen keeps a simple count of how many sites and apps you classify, tied to your account, for product metrics. The count never includes which ones.
v0.4.0
July 14, 2026- Smarter AI site detection: when Focen isn’t sure about an unfamiliar site, it looks the site up to classify it instead of guessing, and never blocks a legitimate site while it’s checking.
- AI chat tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the like) no longer count as focus time on their own. Add one to your work sites or apps if you want it to.
- Focus mode now blocks a flagged site the moment it’s identified.
- Refreshed the app’s accent color to match the Focen brand.
v0.3.4
July 12, 2026- Windows: no more console window flashing on screen during a session.
- On the free plan, Focen now leaves sites it doesn’t recognize alone: no yellow dot and no “Is this for work?” prompt. It only steps in on known distractions and the sites you add. Strict and Focus mode still block unknown sites.
- When your 7-day AI trial ends, you see your real stats from the week and a one-tap way to keep AI.
- Opt in to product emails from a one-time prompt or the new toggle in Settings, and unsubscribe in one click anytime.
- A companion iPhone app is coming soon; your response mode and focus mode will sync to it.
v0.3.3
July 9, 2026- First launch shows a short welcome for your 7-day AI trial, with a live days-left indicator so you always know where you stand.
v0.3.2
July 5, 2026- “Pause Focen” is now a button in the session row, right next to End Session.
v0.3.1
July 5, 2026- Allow a site for 15 or 30 minutes and Focen now turns green while you’re on it, instead of staying amber.
- The “Pause Focen” control is a clearer, more distinct button.
- Tidier session panel: dropped the mode label at the bottom.
- The activity log shows the site you’re on, not the browser it’s running in.
- Break screen reads “Take a break.”
v0.3.0
July 4, 2026- Two plans: the full focus app is free, and the AI plan adds automatic classification of sites Focen hasn’t seen before.
- Founding pricing locked in for the first 100 subscribers.
v0.2.0
July 4, 2026- Break enforcement, temporary “allow this site” windows, research mode, and session pausing.
- Blocked tabs restore to where you left them once a session ends, on Mac and Windows.
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