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 5 of 18
Draw and guess with a room code, or play solo against the clock on the evenings when nobody answers the group chat.
- 2 min
Short shots of interface design, illustration and branding from designers around the world. A mood board that never quite ends.
- 10 min
One button, one endless right angle, one car sliding off the edge of the world. The purest possible drifting game.
Precise Hindu calendar giving tithi, nakshatra and auspicious timings for any date and location. Astronomically rigorous throughout.
Balance a truck over obstacle courses clearly designed by somebody who has never driven anything at all.
Search without the profile building, plus bang shortcuts that fire your query straight at another site. Type an exclamation and w for Wikipedia.
- <1 min
Gamified courses in dozens of languages, plus the guilt engine keeping most people's streaks technically alive.
- 2 min
- Sound on
A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.
- <1 min
Nature recordings from named places with coordinates attached, so you know exactly which rainforest you are sitting in.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.
- <1 min
The 2001 humour portal that somehow still updates, with the same mix of clips, pictures and questionable taste.
- 10 min
- Not at work
- Sound on
A search engine that funds tree-planting projects with its profits and publishes regular reports showing where the money went.
The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.
- <1 min
A fantasy city builder with elves, humans and a genuine research tree, played entirely in a browser tab and unusually pretty.
One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.
- <1 min
Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.
- 2 min
Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.
- <1 min
Shows you an emoji and starts a timer while you run round the room pointing your phone camera at the real object.
- 2 min
Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.
- <1 min
Two emoji in, one hybrid out, with a randomiser for when you cannot decide which pairing to ruin next.
- <1 min
Every emoji with its meaning, its history and how it renders on each platform. Settles arguments in one link.
- 10 min
The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.
- 10 min
An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.
Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.
- 10 min
Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.
- 1 hr+
Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.
- 2 min
Slide across a stack of time zones and see the hour for everyone at once. The quickest way to find a meeting slot that spans continents.
- <1 min
All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.
Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.
- 10 min
Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.
- 10 min
Found VHS footage cut into collages by a collective that also owns most of the world's remaining copies of Jerry Maguire.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.
- 1 hr+
Philosophers dropped into absurd situations, with an explanatory footnote in case you skipped that seminar.
Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.
The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.
An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.
- 1 hr+
Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.
- 2 min
FactNet
AltFShort, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.
- 10 min
London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.
- 1 hr+
Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Accurately drawn birds swearing at each other about territory, mating and the general indignity of being a bird.
Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.
- 10 min
Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.
Tens of thousands of fan-run wikis, each documenting one fictional universe in wholly unreasonable depth.
The official fantasy football game: free, enormous, and the reason several million people care deeply about a Wolves fixture.
- 10 min
An internet speed test that starts the moment the page opens and shows one big number. Tap for upload speed and latency if you want more.
- <1 min
US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.
- 10 min
- Sound on
A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.
- <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.