Not A Browser vs Opal

25 August 2026 · facts checked against public sources on that date

Opal is the most heavily marketed app in this space, and if you have searched for a way to use your phone less you have seen it. It is also the most expensive by a wide margin, and it does not run on Android at all.

What the money buys

At roughly $99.99 a year, Opal costs about five times what most of its competitors do and infinitely more than ScreenZen, which is free and blocks apps perfectly well.

That gap is not blocking. Blocking is close to a commodity: several free apps do it, and some do it more configurably. What Opal sells is the layer above: analytics on where your attention goes, and coaching built on top of that data.

Whether that is worth the money has a clean test, and it is not about the features.

Will you read it? If you are the sort of person who will genuinely open a weekly report, notice that Tuesday evenings are bad, and change something, then Opal is doing work no free blocker does and the price is defensible. If you will glance at it twice in January and never again, you have bought a $99 blocker.

Most people, honestly, are the second kind. Worth knowing that about yourself before the annual renewal rather than after.

The Android problem

Opal is iPhone-only, and has been for its whole life.

This is worth pointing out as a pattern rather than a complaint about one company. The two most visible, most marketed apps in this category (Opal and one sec) are both iOS-first or iOS-only. So the impression a search leaves is that this is a well-served market, when for Android users it is a thinner one than it looks.

If you landed here searching for an Opal alternative on Android, the honest answer depends on what you want it for:

• App blocking: AppBlock is the strongest Android-native option, and it can block parts of apps (Reels, Shorts, Stories) rather than only whole apps. ScreenZen is free and cross-platform. Freedom covers your laptop too.
• Analytics: Android's own Digital Wellbeing gives you the usage data free. It is less polished than Opal's and it is the same information.
• The browser: none of the above, which is the next section.

What blocking cannot do

Opal can block your browser, and this is where every app-blocker meets the same wall.

Blocking a browser does not make the web go away. It makes your phone stop working during the block, in small, constant, specific ways: the parcel link does nothing, the verification email does nothing, the QR menu on the restaurant table does nothing.

So you unlock. And now unlocking is a habit, performed at the exact moments you are least inclined to be strict with yourself, with a plausible reason attached every time.

Not A Browser does not block anything, which means there is nothing to unlock. The links keep working. What is missing is the search bar, permanently, and no amount of wanting it back at 11pm produces one.

The data question

One last difference, mentioned because it is structural rather than a marketing point.

Opal's product is data about you: where your attention went, when, and how that changed. It cannot work without collecting that, and collecting it is the value.

Not A Browser collects nothing, which is not a moral position so much as an inevitable one: an app with no accounts, no history and no sync has nothing to gather. The direct consequence is that it can never show you a chart. If insight into your own behaviour is what you are shopping for, we are structurally incapable of providing it, and Opal is the product built for that.