What's new in Focen.
Focen is in active beta and improving every week. Here's what has shipped.
v0.9.5
LatestOctober 11, 2026- Messages, calls, music, LinkedIn, calendars and system apps are neutral. Focen never counts them as drift.
- Apps you work in count as work during a session.
- Neutral apps and sites show in grey in your session list, so you can mark them.
- Focen no longer closes an app it is not sure about.
v0.9.4
October 10, 2026- The warning when you drift is simpler: allow the site for 15 or 30 minutes, or mark it as work.
- Always allow now asks you to confirm.
- Focus mode and response mode stay in step with your iPhone more reliably.
v0.9.3
October 10, 2026- If your Mac stops responding during a session, your iPhone is released within about an hour, even when Focen is closed on it.
v0.9.2
October 8, 2026- Focus mode stays in step between your Mac and iPhone within seconds, in both directions.
v0.9.1
October 7, 2026- On a Mac with a notch, a short note after the update shows where Focen lives.
- New accounts get an optional question about their age range.
v0.9.0
October 5, 2026- On a Mac with a notch, Focen sits in the notch with your session time beside it. Rest the pointer on it or click it to open the panel.
- Setup asks what you do, and Focen uses it to sort sites and apps for your kind of work. You can change it in Settings.
- Music is neutral. Music apps and sites are never blocked and never count as focus or drift.
- Marking a site or app as work is more reliable. Your newest mark wins, and a mark on one page beats a mark on the whole site.
v0.8.18
September 27, 2026- The plan screen shows the yearly plan as $2.88 a week, billed $149.99 a year, with the monthly plan underneath.
- The welcome offer on the plan screen is now 50% off your first month on the monthly plan.
v0.8.17
September 25, 2026- Settings is simpler. The explanations in More settings now sit behind a small ? next to each setting, and the main page has fewer notes.
- If you already use Focen, you can sign in from the first screen of setup. With an active plan you go straight to a short guide to the menu bar panel.
- Setting up on your Mac now saves to your account, so the iPhone app can skip the questions you already answered.
- Signing in during setup no longer opens the menu bar panel on top of the setup window, and the plan screen has a Restore purchases button.
v0.8.16
September 25, 2026- The first-run setup is new. It shows how Focen works on your Mac and iPhone, asks how much of your day goes to distractions and how long you usually work in one go, and ends with sign-in and picking a plan in the same window.
- Settings lists the sites and apps Focen has sorted, each with a Work or Distraction switch, so you can correct one it got wrong. This replaces the lists you typed by hand, and anything you added there still counts.
v0.8.15
September 24, 2026- When Focen blocks a site, it takes you back to the tab you were working in, even when that tab is in another window. If the tab is gone, you go back to the app you were last working in.
- When Focen blocks something on your Mac, your iPhone stays shielded for the rest of the session instead of opening again straight away.
- Later in a session, Focen asks if you are done before it blocks anything, and nothing is blocked while the question is on screen. If you do not answer, it steps in after the usual time.
- A session that should end on its own now does, even when the site was already blocked earlier in the session.
v0.8.14
September 23, 2026- Each finished session now also records how many times you came back to work on your own and how many times Focen brought you back, for the iPhone app's stats.
- The trial screen records when it is shown, the plan you pick and when checkout opens, on your account. Nothing about your browsing is included.
v0.8.13
September 20, 2026- Focus mode is the only instant block. Strict mode gives the phone the same minute the computer gives before it acts, and the switch sits on the panel before a session starts as well as during one. Switching it on says what it does.
- A change to focus mode or the response mode on the phone reaches the computer within a minute, and the other way round.
- Time focused now matches between the computer and the phone: finished sessions go to one shared history, and a session both devices ran counts once.
- A page on a distracting site is judged on its own. A lecture on YouTube counts as work; the site's home page does not. Instagram, TikTok and Twitch stay blocked whole.
- Site classification moved to a faster model. New sites and pages are sorted in about a fifth of a second instead of half a second, and more accurately in our tests.
v0.8.12
September 15, 2026- Setup starts by asking what pulls you away most, and those picks go straight into your distraction list. After setup, Focen shows a summary of what it will do before you sign in.
- The trial screen is now the place to subscribe: pick yearly or monthly, start the 7-day free trial with one button, and enter a creator or discount code so it is applied at checkout.
- Your first 24 hours with Focen come with a welcome offer: 25% off the first payment, applied for you on the trial screen.
- Signing in with Google on the computer works again. Since 0.8.11 the sign-in code was sent to Google in a form it rejected as malformed.
v0.8.11
September 14, 2026- Focen is now a subscription with a 7-day free trial. A new account sees the trial screen after signing in, with the monthly and yearly plans; accounts from before this version keep the plan they had.
- Signing in with Google on the computer opens Google directly instead of a supabase.co page, and the login screen shows a spinner until the sign-in comes back.
- The expanded panel is wider, buttons press down when tapped, and the update prompt offers the newest version rather than the next one.
- A Stats tab: time focused, time saved, your streak, and the sites and apps that cost the most, with the last 14 days as a chart. It counts closed distractions once per visit and ignores glances shorter than 30 seconds when working out what is usual.
- Session ends and the phone push carry the reason, so the phone shows why a session ended.
v0.8.10
September 13, 2026- The end waits for a distraction open on the computer itself. A shield tap on the phone, including "Back to work", could end the computer's session five minutes later; now it can only raise the question.
- The block page's "Give me 5 more minutes" holds both the question and the end for those five minutes.
- A session only starts on its own while the app in front is the one holding the microphone. Any app with the microphone open used to count, so Discord idling in a voice channel or a recording app kept an empty chair looking attended. On macOS before 14.2, where the system does not say who holds the microphone, a call app in front counts by its name.
- "Start session now" while the start was waiting for input keeps the minutes already earned instead of starting from zero.
- A break taken on the phone is counted once, even when it overlaps the computer going to sleep, and ending it early on the phone reaches the computer. Two breaks taken from the block screen without opening Focen in between are both counted.
- Signing in with Apple after a failed Google attempt no longer fails with a code-verifier error. The login screen lost its subtitle.
v0.8.9
September 13, 2026- The "End sessions without asking" switch from 0.8.8 is gone, and so is the offer to turn it on. Between the point where Focen asks whether you are done and the point where it stops asking, a distraction gets the question. Past the second point it ends the session and tells you after. Both wait as long as the light takes to start flashing, thirty seconds on Strict, so a glance does neither.
- Focus mode never asks and never ends a session on its own, on the computer or on the phone. It runs until you end it.
- The end waits for a distraction that is open right now. Time on a tab Focen had already put away could end a session while you were back at work in Mail or Finder.
- Ending a break early on the phone now reaches the computer, so a ten minute break ended after one costs the session one minute on both.
v0.8.8
September 12, 2026- A session no longer starts on its own while nobody is at the computer. Focen waits for a keystroke or mouse movement in the last thirty seconds, or a microphone in use, so a call still counts. Before this, a work app left open could start a session and shield your phone from across the room.
- Focen never asks whether you are done while a work app is in front. It asks when the light would start flashing, which is the same wait the amber light gets, and in strict or focus mode that is thirty seconds on a distraction. A Zoom call an hour in no longer gets the question.
- With "End sessions without asking" on, a distraction past your stop point ends the session. It used to ask anyway if you had answered "still working" to an earlier question that session. "I was still working" on the summary is what turns it back off; the setting for the stop point only shows while the switch is on.
- A five-minute break taken on the phone is taken off the computer's session clock, so the two agree on how long you worked. The computer keeps watching through it. Time the computer had already stopped counting, because the screen was off or you had paused, is not taken off twice.
- "Session starts after" now starts at five minutes. The one and three minute options are gone, and anyone who had them is moved to five.
- A strict session no longer shows the amber dot from its first second, before anything has been opened, and no longer tells the phone that shielding is close when nothing is. Amber still comes at the first second of a real distraction.
- Creators get a link at focen.app/yourname. Visits, downloads, accounts made within a week of visiting, and sales from those accounts are counted for them. The site keeps the creator code on the visitor's own device for ninety days and nowhere else.
- The phone hears when the computer goes to sleep or wakes again. The message was being refused on the way, so the lid-close release from 0.8.6 never reached the phone; it is a backend fix and is already live for every version.
v0.8.7
September 10, 2026- The block page explains why a site was put away, and the ways out are on the page itself. "Mark this as work" is back on it, with a confirm that names the site.
- Sites and apps you add can follow your account to a new machine or a reinstall. Removals do not travel yet.
- Focen now waits at least thirty minutes into a session before asking whether you are done, up from twenty. If your sessions usually run under about forty minutes, thirty is when it will ask.
- On a Mac, answering "are you done?" sends the panel back to the tray instead of leaving it open.
- A session Focen ended on its own no longer teaches it how long you work. Those ends always landed above your typical length, so the question kept moving later.
- If Focen ended a session it should not have, the summary has a way to say so. Saying so restarts the session and drops the guess back to asking.
- LinkedIn and other professional networks are neutral as a site, since the feed behaves like social media and the jobs pages do not. The page-level check can still tell the two apart.
- X (twitter.com) is off the built-in distraction list. It is treated like any unlisted site now: left alone on the free plan, judged by the classifier on the AI plan. Add it to your distraction sites if you want it blocked regardless.
- The desktop panel draws a QR code for the iPhone app instead of a link that opened the App Store website on a Mac, and nothing describes the iPhone app as coming any more.
- New users are asked once, at the end of onboarding, where they heard about Focen. It can be skipped.
- Every push to a linked phone records whether it landed and why not, so cross-device problems can be looked into.
v0.8.6
September 7, 2026- Past the point where Focen would ask whether you are done, opening a distraction asks right away instead of waiting out a grace period. On Strict the wait made the question unreachable, because the tab was put away before it could be asked.
- A tab you reopen after Focen put it away turns red at once, and the five-minute snooze on a block is honoured.
- Private and incognito windows now block sites Focen already knows are distractions, from your lists, the built-in list, or an earlier verdict. Nothing about a private tab is looked up or recorded.
- The block page is cut back to the Focen mark, the name, and the five-minute snooze. The "This is work" and "Allow 15 or 30 minutes" buttons are gone from it.
- On a Mac, Focen can turn on Do Not Disturb for the length of a session. It is off by default and runs through two Shortcuts you make once, because macOS has no API for it. Windows has none either, so there is no switch there.
- On a Mac, Focen tells your phone when the lid is closing, before it closes, so the phone unshields on its own five minutes later instead of waiting for you to open the app.
- Ending a session on the Mac now wakes the phone so it unshields on its own, instead of waiting until you open Focen there, and a push that fails is retried.
- A session has an identity that does not move, so a break no longer makes your phone think a new session started.
- Marking one search as work no longer marks the whole search engine as work. If google.com is already in your work sites from an earlier search, remove it by hand.
- The tray icon stays where you dragged it in the menu bar. The end prompt covers the panel and can be dragged. The remove button on a long work site is no longer clipped.
- Four privacy fixes from a data audit: the trial email's "this week" now really covers a week, a table of every URL Focen had parked was deleted because nothing read it, the demo classifier no longer stores raw IP addresses, and turning sharing off on the phone now reaches the Mac.
v0.8.4
September 1, 2026- Ending a session and then quitting or reinstalling could leave your phone shielded until you opened Focen there. The queued end now survives a quit.
- The update banner records that you chose "on next launch" instead of offering the same version again every few hours.
v0.8.3
September 1, 2026- The classifier had a run of bugs: a page's own title could talk it into a verdict, a marker in a link could permanently whitelist a host, a blank reply stopped the fallback chain, local and intranet addresses were leaving the machine, focen.app earned arming credit, old.reddit.com and youtu.be were never blocked, and "Just this page" was marking every page on the site.
- Figma, Notion, Vercel and other tools people work in had started coming back neutral after the previous change. They are work again.
v0.8.2
September 1, 2026- A two-second glance at a distraction no longer turns the light amber or names your browser as the thing you drifted to.
- The tray dot was amber from the first second of every session on default settings. It is green while you work.
- The classifier answers neutral more often when a site is neither work nor distraction, and its deeper lookup, which had never returned a verdict, now does.
- On Windows the classifier never saw a page's title, only its address, so two pages on the same site could not be told apart. It now gets the title from the window.
- A single server error no longer signs you out mid-session.
- Focus mode can block a native app again after it has been closed once, and the learned session length now counts sessions you ended by answering "yes, I'm done" or from your phone, not only the ones ended with the button.
- Two hours of work followed by a distraction now asks whether the session is over. It never did, because the two parts of Focen that watch for drift were reading different evidence.
v0.8.1
August 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 active 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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