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 8 of 18
The real museum of 25,000 banana-related objects has a website, and it looks exactly as you are already imagining.
- 2 min
Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.
- 1 hr+
Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.
- 10 min
A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.
- 1 hr+
Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.
- 10 min
Answers the question in one word, correctly, in ninety languages, and has done every single day since 2009.
Answers the question with a single word, and has been right every single time anybody has checked.
A marketplace of language tutors giving one-to-one video lessons at wildly varying prices and standards.
- 10 min
- Sound on
The party packs everybody streams: one screen shared with the room, everybody else playing from their own phone browser.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Kaomoji, dongers and text faces sorted by category, with a copy button attached to every single one of them.
- 2 min
Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.
- 10 min
Turn any photograph into a jigsaw of up to three hundred pieces, then send the link to a relative who will finish it faster.
- 10 min
Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.
- <1 min
Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.
- 10 min
Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.
- 10 min
Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.
- <1 min
Shows one fresh post at a time from a hand-picked list of personal blogs. Press next and you are reading a stranger's corner of the internet.
The quiz platform from every classroom and every away-day, with a free tier and a room code that anybody can join in seconds.
- 10 min
The channel that turned the Backrooms into found footage, shot with unnervingly good camera work and almost no music.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Thousands of Japanese emoticons sorted by emotion, running from mild confusion all the way to full table flipping.
- 2 min
Seattle public radio with the famous in-studio live sessions, a human DJ on air at all hours and a playlist page that credits everything.
- <1 min
- Sound on
One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.
- 2 min
Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.
- 10 min
Documentation of the vast Victorian asylums built to one architectural theory of curing madness, most now empty or demolished.
- 10 min
Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.
- 10 min
A tidy portal of casual browser games with an unusual amount of care given to which ones are actually finished.
- <1 min
Painting app with layers, symmetry and a genuinely good brush engine, loading instantly and uploading nothing anywhere.
- 10 min
The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.
- 1 hr+
Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.
- <1 min
Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.
- 10 min
Retail history blog named after the ghost outline a shop sign leaves behind, mapping the slow decline of the American mall.
- 10 min
Tarot taught properly, with free card meanings, a clean illustrated deck and lessons that never ask you to believe anything.
- 10 min
Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.
- 10 min
Free audio courses that teach by making you work out the grammar yourself, made by one person with no adverts.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Two decades of listening data turned into recommendations, similar-artist chains and neighbours with suspiciously identical taste.
- 10 min
Fitts, Hick, Jakob and the rest, each with a plain explanation and a poster you will end up printing out.
- 10 min
French satire named by scrambling Le Figaro, and taken seriously by French social media with depressing regularity.
- 10 min
The 1979 economics lesson still intact — buy lemons, read the forecast, set a price, discover the weather has opinions.
- 10 min
The Lenny face and its several hundred descendants, catalogued and one click away from your clipboard.
- <1 min
Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.
- <1 min
Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.
- 1 hr+
Looks like a plain platformer until the floor vanishes, the ceiling drops and the exit walks away. Trolling you is the actual mechanic.
Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.
- 1 hr+
Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.
- 10 min
Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.
- <1 min
Millions of chess tactics pulled from real games and served at exactly your rating, entirely free and with no account required.
- 2 min
Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.
- <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.