A pause, not a punishment
You can always go in. On purpose, with a time you chose. An app that makes you feel caught is an app you delete by Thursday.
Why we built it
We built this for ourselves first.
We're product people and engineers. We spend our working lives building things designed to hold your attention—and at some point we noticed we were losing hours to our own phones.
Evenings gone. Mornings that started in a feed. More and more of life happening on the internet instead of in it. We knew exactly which techniques were doing it to us, and it didn't help in the slightest.
So we built the thing we needed. Not a lock—we'd already tried locks, and we always found a way around our own rules. What worked was smaller: one moment of choice before the app opens. Long enough to notice you never decided to open it.
Hima is that moment. We made it for ourselves, and then it turned out that nearly everyone we knew needed the same thing.
Why Hima
The name carries two meanings, on purpose.
Both point at the same thing: being present, and having time that truly belongs to you.
Japanese
暇 — hima — means “free time.”
Time when you're not occupied. Modern apps compete for every spare minute you have. Hima is designed to do the opposite—to help you reclaim those minutes and decide for yourself what to do with them.
Armenian
հիմա — hima — means “now.”
Not later. Not after one more video, one more notification, or one more scroll. Now. It's a simple word, but it's the idea at the center of Hima: returning your attention to what's happening in front of you—your work, your thoughts, the people around you, or simply a quiet moment with yourself.
Hima is the time you get back.
Hima is the moment you return to.
We don't believe technology needs to disappear from our lives. We believe it should stop making our choices for us.
Sometimes all it takes is a small pause before opening an app, one conscious breath, or a reminder that you were about to do something else. That pause is Hima.
Your time. Your attention. Now.
How we make decisions
Four rules we don't break.
Every one of them costs us something—engagement, retention, a metric someone would like us to raise. That's rather the point.
No shame mechanics
No streaks that punish you for one bad day, no points, no score for your life. Your day isn't a leaderboard.
Nothing inside Hima is built to keep you in Hima
No feed, no infinite anything, no notification designed to pull you back. A tool about attention has no business stealing it.
We don't want your data, and we built it so we can't have it
Your Screen Time data never leaves your iPhone. Not as a policy we could quietly change—as an architecture we'd have to rebuild.
Open on purpose.