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 17 of 18
Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.
- 10 min
Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.
- 1 hr+
The big one: broadcast radio, sport and podcasts from most of the world, free with adverts and no account needed to listen.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.
- 2 min
Searchable captions across millions of hours of broadcast news, which makes it possible to find the exact moment something was said.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.
The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.
- 10 min
The community record of Cicada 3301, the recruitment puzzle whose final book has still never been deciphered.
You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.
- 1 hr+
Uno against bots or friends, with the draw-four arguments fully intact and no cards to lose under the sofa.
- 2 min
High-resolution photographs from a huge community of photographers, free to download and use. Browse by topic or colour without signing up.
- 2 min
Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.
- <1 min
Where teenagers make the quizzes: which sad indie song are you, which Greek deity would pity you. Anyone can build one in minutes.
A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.
- 10 min
Curiously awesome products sold through absurd demonstration videos, most of which are more entertaining than the item itself.
- 10 min
Weather models rendered beautifully enough to watch for their own sake, with layers for wind, rain, snow depth and wave height.
- <1 min
Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.
Home-taped VHS uploaded wholesale to the Internet Archive, adverts, tracking lines and accidental recordings included.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Two decades of hand-picked short films, still the most reliable place online to find something beautiful in nine minutes.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.
- 1 hr+
Daily infographics on markets, commodities and demographics, designed to be understood in a single glance.
Which of the world's volcanoes are erupting today, each with webcams, seismic charts and a running diary of what the mountain has been doing.
- 10 min
Home of a long list of absurd browser games and quizzes, several of which have quietly consumed entire office afternoons.
New York Magazine's pop-culture desk, where the recaps and power rankings are better written than the shows deserve.
Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.
- 2 min
Very long illustrated essays on artificial intelligence, procrastination and the Fermi paradox, drawn in deliberately bad stick figures.
Four-panel strips whose punchline usually involves death, drawn by two Germans with impeccable comic timing.
Risk against real people across hundreds of maps, played in one sitting or over weeks of daily turns. Formerly Warzone and WarLight.
A live room of service-dog puppies in training, which is the single most reliable meeting-break on the internet.
- 10 min
Wildfire incidents across the western United States, mapped and annotated in near real time by volunteers who sit listening to fire radio.
- <1 min
Irish satire with no interest in restraint, regularly mistaken for real reporting by people who should know better.
- 10 min
Guess where a teammate placed a concept on a spectrum between two extremes. The most reliable argument-starter on this list.
- 10 min
Climate averages for any city as gorgeous year-round charts: sunshine hours, muggy days, wind, and precisely when the good weather ends.
- 10 min
Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.
- <1 min
Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.
Full-resolution images from the James Webb telescope, with the explanations of what you are actually looking at.
- <1 min
Live webcams sorted by country and theme, from Alpine passes to Caribbean beach bars, with a great many pointed at completely empty roads.
- <1 min
Drag through a full-screen fluid that swirls and bleeds colour behind the cursor, at full frame rate even on a phone.
- <1 min
The long-running forum where amateur investigators pick apart cold cases, for better and occasionally much worse.
Genuinely baffling real product listings pulled from the big marketplaces and presented with almost no commentary.
- 2 min
The account that rates every dog above ten out of ten and has defended that scale in public for over a decade.
The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.
- <1 min
The space station's position, ground track and next passes over you, with an orbital countdown that is oddly hard to stop watching.
Two portraits side by side, one photographed and one generated. A University of Washington project, and your score keeps falling.
A relationship graph of everybody famous, cross-referenced far past the point of reason and updated constantly.
Which record a sample came from, who covered whom and where that drum break originally lived, with the two tracks played side by side.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Search engine for hand-made pages in the spirit of the early web, with a surprise-me button that behaves exactly like 1998.
- <1 min
Instructions for very nearly anything, illustrated in that unmistakable cartoon style. The artwork alone justifies the visit.
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.