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 3 of 18
Where the bridge world actually plays: free tables at every hour, tournaments, and teaching rooms of remarkable patience.
- 1 hr+
The write-draw-write chain game that predates the current crop, still running, still free and still producing pure nonsense.
- 10 min
Brown bears standing in an Alaskan waterfall catching salmon in mid-air, live from Katmai, and the reason Fat Bear Week exists.
Every recipe costed per serving and per batch, with step photos throughout. Built for people cooking against an actual number.
- 10 min
Plays the notification sounds of Slack, email and Teams on a loop so it sounds like somebody urgently needs you.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Enormous plain-text library explaining what every placement and aspect is supposed to mean, unpaywalled since the early 2000s.
- 10 min
A breathing bubble with adjustable pace, sitting on a page that mercifully does not require the app to work.
Thirty-odd card games with competent bots, no accounts and nothing covering the table. The default answer to fancying a game.
- 10 min
A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.
- 2 min
Twenty years of forensic argument about how tall film stars really are, with photographic evidence and footwear analysis.
Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.
Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.
Per-component checklists — buttons, forms, cards, empty states — covering the things everyone forgets until review.
- 10 min
Chess tactics training with a rating that goes down, plus an endgame trainer that reveals exactly how much you do not know.
- 2 min
The default chess address for most of the planet, with a bot for every skill level and puzzles that will quietly humble you.
- 2 min
A chihuahua rotating to a dance track, which was apparently a complete website idea in 2013 and somehow still is.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Long branching novels where your stats matter and the prose does not embarrass itself; a good number play free in the browser.
- 1 hr+
Community-written choose-your-path stories with ratings, which is the only thing keeping the good ones above the fan fiction.
- 10 min
Google's stripped-back sketchpad — pencil, pen, marker, chalk — with pressure support and absolutely no other features.
- 10 min
The offline dinosaur from Chrome's error page, playable while you still have a perfectly good connection.
- <1 min
Fourteen small experiments — spectrogram, harmonics, arpeggios — that explain how music works by letting you break it.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Five photographs, one question each: what year was this taken? Points scale with how close you land, and the cars always give it away.
How far you can get by train from any European station in five hours, drawn as coloured bands. Ruinous for an afternoon's productivity.
- 10 min
Parody religion with its own prophet, apocalypse date and merchandise, committed to the bit long enough that you stop being sure.
- 10 min
Decades of adverts preserved exactly as broadcast, including the jingles you will regret having remembered.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Paint over the tourist, the bin or the power line and it fills in whatever should have been behind them.
- <1 min
Click monsters, hire heroes to click for you, then ascend for souls. The clicker that dragged the whole genre onto Steam.
- 1 hr+
Viral-content parody taken well past the point of sense, including quizzes that insult you for finishing them.
- 10 min
A global membership devoted to looking up, with a cloud of the day and a manifesto against blue-sky thinking.
- 10 min
Curated stumble button that sends you somewhere good rather than somewhere random, with categories if you are feeling fussy.
Fill-in-the-blank sentences mined from real corpora, aimed squarely at people who have outgrown the beginner apps.
NASA ephemeris data, brutal one-line notifications and a design language everyone copied. Astrology delivered entirely deadpan.
The word-association board game in a free, well-built online room: two spymasters, one grid of code names, nothing to install.
- 10 min
Run a coffee stand for fourteen days, adjusting recipe and price daily, and learn more about margins than from any lecture.
- 10 min
The murmur of a café without the queue or the cost, built on research that moderate background noise helps creative work.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Settlers of Catan in a browser tab, complete with the trade negotiations and the one player who will not give you wheat.
- 10 min
Hand-picked four-colour palettes posted daily and sorted by mood, with none of a generator's randomness.
- <1 min
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.
- 2 min
An audio museum of sounds made by objects that no longer exist — dial tones, shutter clicks, the whirr of a rewinding tape.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.
- 10 min
Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.
- 1 hr+
Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.
- <1 min
The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.
- <1 min
Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.
- <1 min
Nest and feeder cams run by the Cornell Lab, with ornithologists in the chat explaining what the bird is doing and why it matters.
One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.
- <1 min
Upload any file and receive a genuinely corrupted version back. Built for missing deadlines, used mostly for art.
- <1 min
The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.
- <1 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.