Nothing vs Opal: An Honest Comparison From a Founder
Both apps block distracting apps. What they're blocking toward is entirely different — and that changes which one is right for you.
Opal is a better focus app than Nothing. That's the honest verdict if your goal is blocking distracting apps during work sessions. After a year of testing this with myself, the distinction I'd draw is this: Opal solves the productivity problem. Nothing solves a different one — the rest problem, the 11pm scroll, the gap in the evening that used to be quiet. Those are adjacent problems with different tools.
Both apps show up in the same App Store category. Both block apps. But the framing that drives their design choices is almost opposite, and that matters when you're deciding which one to try.
What Opal is built for
Opal is a focus and productivity tool. It blocks distracting apps in scheduled windows, tracks milestones through its Focus Gems® system, and computes an "Opal Score" from your sleep, focus, and rest data. The app frames blocking as a productivity practice — deep work sessions, optional team accountability, cross-platform blocking on iPhone, Android, and Mac.
If you need Instagram out of the way while you write, Opal handles that cleanly. The ~$100/year price is substantial, but the feature set earns it for that use case. Streak tracking and gamification are built in, and for users who are motivated by them, those mechanics make a real difference. That's not a criticism — for many people, it's exactly the structure that makes the habit hold.
Opal's tagline is "Attention on autopilot." That's accurate. Its design philosophy: tell the app what to block, set it, and stop thinking about it. The automation does the work.
What Nothing is built for
Nothing starts from a different assumption. The problem it addresses isn't focus — it's the reflexive, aimless phone-reach that happens outside of work hours. The late-night scroll when you should be winding down. The morning unlock-and-check before you've been awake thirty seconds. The gap that used to go unfilled and now defaults to a feed.
Where Opal asks "what do you need to block to focus?" Nothing asks "what do you want to do with the gap?" The answer it offers is: nothing. One minute, phone face-down, no agenda. And the apps unlock when that minute ends.
The unlock mechanism is the clearest expression of what separates them. Opal's blocks release on a scheduled timer or an override you set. Nothing's blocks release when you've actively paused. One is automated protection; the other is a small competing behavior you practice each time. As screen-time limits explain in more detail: passive restriction leaves the underlying gap open. A replacement behavior closes it.
Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism describes the pattern: removing technology alone rarely works, because most people haven't decided what they want to put in the gap. Nothing makes that decision explicit — one quiet minute — so the gap has somewhere to go.
Side by side
The table below captures the features that most often drive the choice. A few are deal-breakers depending on which problem you're solving — the unlock mechanism and streak tracking especially, because they reflect the app's entire philosophy.
| | Nothing | Opal | |---|---|---| | Core framing | Rest, recovery | Focus, productivity | | Free tier | Yes — core timer always free | Partial | | Streaks / gamification | None | Yes — Focus Gems®, streaks | | App blocking | Yes | Yes | | Unlock mechanism | 1-minute pause | Session timer or override | | Mood reflection | Yes | No | | Minimum session | 1 minute | Varies | | Platforms | iPhone | iPhone, Android, Mac |
The platform column matters. If you want blocking across your laptop as well as your phone, Opal covers that. Nothing is iPhone only right now.
The free-tier difference also matters practically. Nothing's core timer is always free — you can use the one-minute pause forever without paying. Blocking and the journey calendar are optional paid features. Opal offers some free blocking but puts most of the feature set behind the subscription.
The sixty-second reset is the core design principle: one minute repeated across most days builds a different relationship with rest than occasional longer sessions. Frequency, not duration.
Sources
- Opal (2025). Opal — Attention on autopilot. Product page
- Newport C (2019). Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Portfolio/Penguin. Book page
- Wilmer HH, Sherman LE, Chein JM (2017). Smartphones and cognition: A review of research exploring the links between mobile technology habits and cognitive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 605. Full text
— Anton Lev, Founder Founder of Nothing. Building tools for people who can't sit still. GitHub
FAQ
- If my goal is focus at work, should I use Opal instead?
- Probably, yes. Nothing is not a productivity tool. Its blocking is designed for recovery contexts, not "I need to write 2,000 words this morning." If scheduled deep work sessions with automated app blocking across all your devices are what you need, Opal is better suited to that goal and has more features for it.
- Can I use both apps at the same time?
- Yes, and some people do — Opal during work hours, Nothing in the evening. They don't conflict. The use cases are distinct enough that using one doesn't undermine the other.
- Why doesn't Nothing have streaks?
- Streaks turn consistency into a loss-aversion game: a missed day becomes a failure event. For some habits, that pressure is useful. For rest, it tends to produce shame loops — and a wellness practice that creates shame is a wellness practice people stop using. ADHD brains are especially sensitive to this pattern. Nothing is deliberately streak-free: skip a day, and there's nothing to pick back up, because nothing was ever built on the streak in the first place.