A small team with a stubborn idea.

Where it started

We had tried the screen-time apps. The ones that block harder until you resent them. The ones that pile on friction until you uninstall them. The ones that turn a quiet evening into a scoreboard. They all share a premise: that attention is a willpower war, and the answer is to fight it harder.

We think the premise is wrong. There is the part of the mind that reaches for the phone on reflex, and the part that can watch that reflex and decide. The gap between them is small, and it is trainable. So we built a tool with one job: widen that gap, a second or two at a time, until the choosing becomes the habit.

What Grove is

A place you tend, not an alarm that nags you. The whole product is built around a single interaction — the threshold moment — the calm half-second when you reach for something you set aside and get to decide whether to cross. Everything else is in service of that.

What Grove is not

• Not gamified. No streaks, no confetti, no vanity numbers.
• Not a punishment machine. The app never scolds and never celebrates too hard.
• Not parental controls. Grove uses Individual authorization. It is for you, not for watching someone else.
• Not a feature arms race. The busiest competitor overwhelms people. Restraint is the feature.

What we believe

These are the constraints we design under, not slogans.

• Discernment over suppression. Widen the gap; do not just build a taller wall.
• Calm over clever. No dark patterns, no manufactured urgency, no guilt.
• Easy to plan, hard to undo. Simple to set when you are calm; deliberately resistant when you are not.
• Generous by default. The free tier genuinely works. It is the point, not lost revenue.
• Native to the bone. If Apple ships a good way to do something, we use it.

Who is tending it

Grove is made by a handful of people who care more about the second sentence of a release note than the size of a funding round. We are not trying to become a platform, and we are not planning to sell your attention to anyone. We want to make one good, small thing, and keep it good.