I don't want you to spend time in my app

Every app on your phone is fighting for your attention. Every single one. They want you scrolling, tapping, engaging, staying. The longer you’re in the app, the better their numbers look. That’s the game.

I’m building Retempo to do the opposite.

The engagement trap

Open Instagram. You went to check one thing. Twenty minutes later you’re watching a guy restore a rusty axe. Open a sports app to check tomorrow’s kickoff time. You end up scrolling through transfer rumors, opinion pieces, and a notification asking you to rate the app.

This happens because these apps are designed to keep you there. Infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, “you might also like,” notification badges that never clear. The goal isn’t to answer your question. The goal is to keep you around.

I get why. More time in app means more ad impressions, more data, better metrics to show investors. It makes business sense. But it’s a terrible experience if you just wanted to know when Barcelona plays next.

Open, glance, close

Retempo has no feed algorithm. No likes, comments, or profiles. No content designed to pull you into stuff you didn’t ask for.

Your home feed shows you what’s coming up based on what you’ve subscribed to and where you are. There’s an explore page too, but it’s there to help you check what’s happening next, like a discovery layer — not to keep you browsing for twenty minutes. You open the app, you see what’s relevant, you close it. The whole interaction takes thirty seconds on a good day. On most days, you don’t even need to open it at all — because the notification already told you what you needed to know.

I built it this way on purpose. I don’t want Retempo competing with every other app for your screen time. If the app does its job right, you barely need to look at it.

Notifications that actually help

Here’s the thing most apps get wrong about notifications: they treat them all the same. Something happened, here’s a push notification, good luck figuring out if it matters.

But not everything works the same way.

If Tame Impala just announced London dates and presale opens in two days, you need to know right now. That’s a real deadline — miss the presale window and you might miss the show. A notification three days early makes total sense here.

But if there’s a Premier League match on Saturday, you don’t need a notification on Tuesday. You know football happens on weekends. A heads-up on Friday or Saturday morning is plenty.

Most apps don’t think about this. They either notify you about everything the moment it gets added, or they let you configure 15 different notification settings and hope you figure it out yourself.

Retempo handles it differently. The notification timing depends on what the event actually is. Music events with ticket windows notify early because timing matters. Sports with fixed schedules notify closer to match day because that’s when it’s useful. New game releases notify when they drop. Different events, different logic.

You don’t configure any of this. It just works the way it should.

No noise by design

There’s no “events your friends are interested in” in Retempo. No weekly digest email stuffed with things you never asked about. No social features trying to make you engage with other people’s activity.

If you subscribed to it, you see it. If you didn’t, you don’t. There’s nothing in your feed that you didn’t specifically ask for.

Sounds basic. But think about how rare that actually is. Almost every app you use injects stuff into your experience that you never requested — recommendations, suggestions, promotions, social proof. All of it exists to keep you engaged longer or to sell you something.

Retempo doesn’t do any of that. Not because I think those features are evil, but because they don’t belong in this product. Retempo is a tool. You use it, it gives you what you need, you move on with your day.

Why this is hard to sell

I’ll be honest — “I don’t want you to spend time in my app” is a weird pitch. Engagement is how most apps measure success. Investors ask about daily active users and time in app. Marketing people want sticky features.

But I think there’s a different kind of loyalty. The kind where you trust an app because it respects your time. You open it every day, but only for a few seconds. You never think about uninstalling it because it never annoys you. It just sits there, quietly doing its job, and you rely on it the way you rely on your alarm clock — you don’t think about it until you need it, and when you need it, it’s there.

That’s what I’m going for with Retempo. Not an app you love spending time in. An app you’d miss if it was gone.

More soon. Follow along on X/Twitter or check out retempo.app.

— Quim