About Not A Browser

Not A Browser is a browser for Android with no address bar and no search. It opens links other apps hand it, and URLs from QR codes. That is all it does.

Why it exists

The advice for a calmer phone always arrives in the same shape: delete the social apps, disable the browser, install a launcher. It is decent advice and it collapses at the same point every time.

Disable the browser and the phone stops working in small, constant, infuriating ways. Links from friends do nothing. Bank statements do nothing. The QR code on a restaurant table does nothing. Two-factor emails that arrive as a link do nothing. Within a week the browser is back on, and with it a search bar that is one tap from every doom-scroll on the internet.

The mistake is treating "the web" as the thing to remove. The web is fine. What causes the damage is the open-ended entrance to it: a text field, on a device in your pocket, that will take you anywhere.

You can keep one without the other. That is the entire product.

What it is not

It is not a screen-time app. There are no timers, no streaks, no daily reports, no breathing exercises, no coach. Those tools work by negotiating with you at the moment you are least inclined to negotiate. Not A Browser does not negotiate, because there is nothing to negotiate about. There is no address bar to talk it into showing you.

It is also not a privacy product. Not A Browser collects nothing, and that is worth stating plainly, but it is a consequence rather than a pitch: an app with no accounts, no history and no sync has nothing to collect.

Sign in with Google works, and we expected it not to

Google's published policy says sign-in is refused inside app-embedded browsers, and on the strength of that this app used to intercept accounts.google.com and show its own explanation. Intercepting before the request left the device meant it had never once seen what Google actually does.

Tested on a real phone in August 2026: Google served the sign-in flow, a third-party authorisation completed, and a restricted Google Doc opened afterwards. No refusal, at any step. The app now recognises Google's own refusal message rather than predicting one, so if enforcement ever arrives you get a plain explanation instead of Google's error page.

There is a one-line change that would disguise the app as a stock browser and pre-empt all of this. We have not made it and will not: that is circumventing a security control rather than satisfying one. The wider lesson was cheap to learn and worth writing down. A vendor's policy describes what they reserve the right to do, not what they do.

The things that are genuinely unresolved

Being straight about these is more useful than a feature list.

There is no iPhone version. Apple grants default-browser status only to apps that provide, at launch, a field for typing a URL, a search tool, or curated bookmark lists. Those are the three things this app exists to remove, so the entitlement and the product are mutually exclusive as written. A share-sheet-only version is possible and is a noticeably worse experience. This is unresolved rather than decided.

PDFs. Android's browser engine does not render them. A PDF link currently downloads rather than displaying, which ejects you into another app, against the spirit of the thing. Being worked on.

Who builds it

One person, working alone, and this is the first Android app they have written. The code is deliberately plain for that reason: no dependency injection, no architecture layers, no cleverness that needs a paragraph to justify. It is a browser view and about four buttons, and the code says so.

Getting in touch

Bugs, sites that render badly, and disagreements about the product all go to the same place: hello@notabrowser.app.