Leash

If you uninstalled social media and email from your phone to get your life back, Leash may just be your new browser.

I made it out of my own necessity: For years, I've not only uninstalled social media apps and email from my mobile, I also had disabled my browser – otherwise, it was too tempting to simply distract myself with news sites or webmail.

Some people may have enough willpower to simply not do that, but I need more friction. Enter disabling the browser!

Life without a browser is great, as my phone usage drifted towards more creative things: taking photos, capturing thoughts, catching up and a meticulously curated stream of news, via a RSS reader.

But then, life comes along, and asks you to scan a QR code to purchase a ticket. Also, when friends sent me a website that I should check out, I had to go a lot of extra miles to do that (i.e. adding it to my todo list and checking it at the laptop). Lastly, some things just don't work without a browser, such as signing in for an app that requires you to do the authentication via their website. Oh, and search! I even installed the Wikipedia app to look up things, but it also has limits.

So, I decided to make a 'minimal' browser that will keep the friction where it's needed to withstand the sirens of the internets, but be assistive as a browser should be in living a life in 2026.

So here comes Leash!

It's built to replace your system browser, and it has two major features:

- no address bar
- no favorites

... but you can register it as the 'default browser' on your system, and so you'll be able to use it to open links that come 'from the outside world' (= friends, QR codes) and also to open a web search from your phone's search bar.

I enjoy it a lot, and I hope, you do, too!

(If anything goes wrong, please get in touch – I'm actively developing this, and I'd love to learn about things that aren't working well just yet.)