The people who built our addictive devices are now selling the cure, and the math is starting to work.
A growing slowtech movement is turning “obsolete” gadgets into real businesses, driven by burnout: about 53% of American adults say they want to cut their screen time. The result is a wave of founders, including some who helped build the attention economy, now selling friction, refurbished hardware, and screen-free devices as features worth paying for.
Picture Tony Fadell, the man known as the father of the iPod, walking into New York City’s 28th Street subway station and stopping cold. Staring back at him is a five-by-four-foot poster for the iPod Shuffle, a product he designed more than twenty years ago, now pitching “zero screen time” to a generation drowning in notifications. His first thought was that someone forgot to swap out an old ad. Nobody forgot. That ad is the whole strategy.
What Happened
The poster came from Back Market, the online marketplace for refurbished tech, and CMO Joy Howard put it there on purpose. Her bet is that “obsolete” devices are quietly becoming desirable again.
Howard has a name for the trend: slowtech. The idea is that wired headphones, retro game consoles, CDs, point-and-shoot cameras, and yes, the humble iPod Shuffle, all share one trait people now crave. They do one thing and then leave you alone. An old camera cannot upload to your Instagram story. A Shuffle cannot algorithmically guess your next favorite song. For the first time in two decades, that limitation is the selling point.
“It’s so stunning to me that now people are wanting to bring friction back into their lives, and see that as a feature, rather than a flaw,” Howard told TechCrunch.
The Backstory
Here is the twist that makes this more than a nostalgia play. Some of the loudest slowtech voices are the people who built fast tech in the first place.
Take Austin Murray. Around the same time Fadell was pitching the iPod to Steve Jobs, Murray founded JAMDAT, one of the first mobile gaming companies. Investors laughed at the idea that anyone would play games on a phone. JAMDAT went public and sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million. Murray helped invent the very habit loop he now wants to break.
Today he is building MOQA, a screen time reduction app, and pitching investors who are just as skeptical as the ones who doubted mobile gaming. His diagnosis is blunt: when average phone screen time runs around five hours a day, “it’s not a willpower problem. It’s a product design problem.”
The Core Development
The fatigue is mainstream, not fringe. Roughly 53% of American adults say they want to reduce their screen time, per YouGov. That single number is the entire addressable market, and founders are attacking it from every angle.
The screen-free wearable lane is on fire: American spending on fitness trackers grew 88% year over year, with Circana crediting screenless devices like the Oura ring and Whoop band as key drivers. The dumbphone lane has the Light Phone, whose co-founder Kaiwei Tang says a surprising chunk of buyers are 20 to 35 years old. The software lane has Opal and Freedom, the screen-limiting apps writer Calvin Kasulke pays for, admitting it is “embarrassing to have two different apps to limit how I use this.”
Then there is the gloriously absurd frontier: Mark, a $159 AI bookmark that raised $1 million to stop you from grabbing your phone mid-chapter. Using AI to escape your screen is either genius or a punchline, and the market has not fully decided.
The Business Model Angle
The pattern here is older than the iPhone: sell people the antidote to the thing you already sold them. Cigarette-era nicotine gum, fast-food salads, and now attention-economy detox tools all run the same play.
What makes slowtech sharper is its margin structure. Back Market does not manufacture anything new. It rehabs existing hardware, including discontinued laptops that ship with a USB key to install ChromeOS Flex, turning “dead” machines into working Chromebooks. That is a circular-economy model wearing a wellness halo. The product cost is sunk, the story is premium, and the customer feels virtuous twice, once for unplugging and once for not buying new.
The deeper lesson for founders: when a market spends a decade optimizing away all friction, the next opportunity is often selling friction back. Constraints become a feature the moment abundance becomes the problem. Howard’s framing of friction-as-feature is a genuinely useful lens for any saturated category, not just gadgets.
For context on how the original attention-economy machine was engineered, our breakdown of the Apple business model shows exactly how the ecosystem that founders are now rebelling against was designed to keep you inside it.
The Risk
Now the cold water. Slowtech may be more vibe than viable for most of these bets.
Murray himself is skeptical of the pure “dumbphone” dream, because modern life quietly assumes you carry a smartphone. Banking, hotel check-in, and even credit cards increasingly route through an app. Ditch the smartphone and you do not gain freedom, you gain a daily list of things you can no longer do. That ceiling caps how big the flip-phone segment can ever get.
There is also a contradiction at the center of the movement. The hottest screen-free wearables, Oura and Whoop, still require a smartphone to read your data. A $159 AI bookmark to fix your relationship with your phone is, to plenty of buyers, just the same disease in a nicer outfit. And “I want less screen time” is one of the easiest intentions in the world to state and one of the hardest to pay for month after month. Stated demand of 53% is not the same as durable willingness to spend, which is the gap where wellness trends usually go to die.
Quick Questions
What is slowtech? A movement, named by Back Market CMO Joy Howard, around intentionally limited tech: wired headphones, dumbphones, screenless wearables, retro gadgets, and apps that cut screen time. The pitch is friction as a feature, not a flaw.
Why is the iPod Shuffle being advertised in 2026? Back Market is betting that “obsolete” single-purpose devices now appeal to people who are burned out on always-connected smartphones. The ad’s promise was literally “zero screen time.”
Do people actually want less screen time? About 53% of American adults say they want to reduce it, per YouGov, against an average of roughly five hours a day on the phone. The demand is real. Whether they will pay to fix it is the open question.
Are any of these slowtech companies real businesses? Some have traction. Fitness tracker spending grew 88% year over year on screenless devices like Oura and Whoop, the Light Phone has a decade-old customer base, and Mark raised $1 million. Others are still betting that intent converts to revenue.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The strongest signal here is not nostalgia, it is who is making the bet. When the people who engineered the attention economy start selling its antidote, you are watching insiders price a backlash they understand better than anyone. For founders, the takeaway is the friction insight: in any market that spent a decade removing every speed bump, the next product may be the one that puts a few back. Just remember that 53% of people wanting something is a headline, not a business. The winners will be the ones who turn a stated wish into a recurring charge, and most slowtech bets will quietly fail that test.
Source: TechCrunch
