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 14 of 18
Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.
- 10 min
Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.
A better-drawn take on the guess-the-doodle format, with more brushes, custom word lists and rooms that hold a large group.
- 10 min
Draw the word, guess everyone else's, share one link with the group. The default browser party game, and deservedly so.
- 10 min
The world's largest supplier of real and replica skulls, browsable by species, which is educational and mildly alarming in equal parts.
- 10 min
Live HD cameras on piazzas, beaches and ski slopes across Europe and beyond, which is the closest a browser tab gets to a day trip.
- <1 min
The seat-pocket catalogue survived the airline it came with and moved online, still selling garden yetis to a captive audience.
- 10 min
Grow a snake on glowing pellets and cut other players off so they burst into more of them. The .io boom started here.
- <1 min
Three-minute kart deathmatches with weapon crates and absolutely no patience for anything resembling a racing line.
The National Zoo's cameras on lions, elephants and naked mole rats, publicly funded and refreshingly free of any advertising.
Millions of images and 3D scans from the Smithsonian's collections, released with no copyright restrictions at all.
- 10 min
Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.
- 10 min
Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.
- 10 min
An endless sheet of virtual bubble wrap that pops under the cursor and quietly refills itself behind you.
- <1 min
The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.
- <1 min
Two-legged football played with a single key, in which the physics engine scores most of the actual goals.
- 2 min
Fast three-a-side football with sliding tackles and a World Cup bracket you can win inside a tea break.
- 10 min
Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.
- 10 min
Daily solitaire challenges dealt from guaranteed-winnable shuffles, with a leaderboard for people who want the streak.
- 10 min
Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.
- 2 min
Listener-funded, advert-free channels out of San Francisco, Drone Zone and Groove Salad among them, going since the dial-up era.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Grid sequencer with a marimba and a drum kit, tuned so that anything you tap sounds passable, then shared as a link.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Rule a small kingdom by answering yes or no to whoever walks through the door, then watch the consequences quietly pile up.
- 10 min
Ride a lift from the ground to geostationary orbit, passing every layer of atmosphere and satellite on the way.
- 2 min
The original film's promotional site, left online untouched for nearly thirty years and preserved when the sequel arrived.
- <1 min
Solar flares, sunspot counts and geomagnetic storm levels in real time, plus the aurora forecast that decides whether tonight is worth the drive.
- 10 min
Seven letters, one compulsory centre letter, and the long climb from Solid to Genius. Ruins mornings extremely productively.
- 10 min
A hundred billion dollars and a shopping list running from Big Macs to aircraft carriers, and it is harder to spend than you expect.
Hundreds of thousands of user-made timed quizzes: name every element, every country, every Friends character. The genre's warehouse.
NASA's tracker for when the space station is visible from where you live, with sighting alerts by email.
- 2 min
Everyone knows the location except the spy, who has to bluff through the questioning without ever revealing they have no idea.
- 10 min
A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.
- 10 min
Constructive journalism collected from other outlets into one free feed, so somebody else does all the sifting.
Public domain classics reset properly — typography fixed, typos corrected, covers designed — and then given away.
- 10 min
Curated collections around specific research subjects, preserved because a university decided they would matter later.
- 10 min
Search results passed through without the tracking, plus an option to open any result through a proxy so the site never sees your address.
Ask a sports question in plain English and get the actual numbers back with a chart. Ends pub arguments in about four seconds.
- <1 min
The planetarium in a browser tab — set your location and it shows exactly what is above you right now.
- <1 min
Swing a stick figure between grapple points using one button, then trust momentum to carry the mistake.
- 2 min
An idle game that keeps buying you more stimulation until the page is a lo-fi stream, a podcast and a fidget spinner at once.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Categories under a random letter and a timer: name a country, a food and an animal starting with M, then hit stop before anyone else.
- 10 min
Story Reader
AltFLong-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.
- 1 hr+
A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.
- 2 min
Gag gift shop selling the same reliable nonsense since the dot-com boom, on a layout that has aged in real time.
- 10 min
The endless runner that ate mobile gaming, in a browser tab with the trains, the hoverboards and the shouting guard intact.
- 2 min
Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.
- 10 min
Drop fruit into a box, merge matching pairs and watch the pile creep towards the line. Physics does the rest of the work.
Good news, funny pictures and a daily dose of animals, assembled with no interest whatsoever in what is trending.
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.