Collection
Good on a phone
Plenty of the classic web assumes a mouse and a wide window. Everything in this collection holds up on mobile.
857 sites · page 1 of 18
Disposable inbox that self-destructs after ten minutes. Exactly what you want when a download demands an email address first.
- <1 min
A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.
The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.
- 10 min
The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.
Mahjong solitaire in a dozen layouts with no download and no account, exactly as it was on every family PC in 2004.
- 10 min
Grant Sanderson's maths lessons, plus the written versions of the animations that made linear algebra look like geometry.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Straightforward pool on a proper physics table, against an opponent who punishes a lazy break immediately.
- 2 min
Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.
- 2 min
Seventy statements, four political axes and an ideology label at the end. The open-source template for a hundred imitators.
- 10 min
The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.
- 1 hr+
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
- 1 hr+
Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.
- 2 min
Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.
- 10 min
Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.
- 10 min
Twenty-eight escalating trolley dilemmas that end somewhere very silly, each showing the percentage of people who agreed with you.
- 10 min
Thousands of free electronics tutorials with full wiring diagrams and working code. The gentlest on-ramp to microcontrollers there is.
- 10 min
Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.
Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.
- <1 min
Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.
- 1 hr+
Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.
- 1 hr+
Buy aircraft, plot routes and slowly discover that fuel price is the only variable that ever really mattered.
- 1 hr+
Live flight tracking with airport arrival boards and playback of earlier flights, formerly known as RadarBox and still free to browse.
Aerial 360 panoramas shot from helicopters and drones over volcanoes, cathedrals and Antarctic ice, most of them enormous files worth the wait.
- 10 min
Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.
- 1 hr+
Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.
- 2 min
Type the name of any app and get a crowd-ranked list of alternatives, filtered by platform, price and whether the project is open source.
AltF Pulse
AltFA paused editorial preview that explains the sourcing and publishing controls required before stories return.
- 10 min
An ambient radio station with no announcers, no adverts and nothing that ever resolves, aimed squarely at falling asleep.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Genuine industrial surplus sold with the best product copy on the internet: lab glassware, small motors, and 400 unexplained springs.
- 10 min
Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.
- 10 min
Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.
- 2 min
AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.
- 2 min
Modern tracker with a genuinely good interface, per-episode progress and an open API a great many other tools build on.
- 10 min
Upload a child's drawing of a person and it finds the limbs, rigs them and makes the figure dance. Research that turned out purely delightful.
- 10 min
Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.
Industry news since 1998, plus an encyclopedia with staff and voice credits that nothing else in the space matches.
- 10 min
Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.
- 10 min
Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Multilingual anime, manga and light novel database with unusually careful tagging and full regional release information.
- 10 min
The spaced repetition flashcard system serious learners settle on, with shared decks for nearly every subject.
- 10 min
The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.
- 1 hr+
Seattle's novelty institution: rubber chickens, emergency moustaches and an unreasonable number of items shaped like tinned meat.
- 10 min
Gianni Sarcone's workshop of puzzles and illusions, half optical trickery and half mathematical recreation, running since the 1990s.
- 10 min
Thousands of themed collections built by libraries and museums, each one somebody's deliberate decision about what to keep.
- 10 min
Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.
- 2 min
Botanical infinite zoom drifting through flowers, insects and quiet ruins. Best left running on a second screen.
- <1 min
The Portuguese web archive, notable for full-text search across its whole history rather than only address lookup.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Good on a phone: questions
How many sites are in “Good on a phone”?
857 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 16 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
819 of the 857 are free and need no account. 5 are paid or freemium, and the card says so.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
857 of 857 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 853 are safe for work and 760 work with the sound off.