ANKOR vs Brick
Brick and ANKOR both use NFC to make a phone stop being a phone for a while, and neither one needs a subscription to work. The difference is what the object does for the rest of the day. Brick is a puck you tap and then set down somewhere. ANKOR is a dock on your wall, and the phone rests there whenever you are home.
What each one is
Brick is a small NFC puck. You fix it somewhere in your home, tap your phone against it, and the apps you picked become unavailable until you come back and tap it again. It is bought once and it keeps working. It has sold well and it earned that honestly: people who buy one tend to report that it does exactly what it claims.
ANKOR is a wall dock with an NFC chip in it, assembled and finished in Switzerland. The phone rests on the dock, a session starts, and the apps you chose stay quiet while the session runs. The companion app is required. It is available for iPhone and Android.
Both start from the same premise. Willpower is not the mechanism. Something in the room has to change.
How a session starts and how it ends
With Brick, tapping starts the session and tapping ends it. That symmetry is the product’s real strength, because ending one means walking back to wherever the puck is. The friction is the distance you built in when you decided where to put it.
With ANKOR, you tap the top edge of the phone to the dock and hang it up. The session starts with that tap and ends with a second one. The difference is where the tap happens: not on a puck in your pocket, but at the one place on the wall where the phone now belongs.
Both end with a tap. The difference is what you tap: Brick is an object you carry and can leave in a drawer, ANKOR is fixed to the wall, so the boundary lives in the room rather than in your pocket.
Where the object lives the rest of the day
This is the difference that shows up after the first week. A Brick is small and has no other job, so it tends to end up in a drawer, in a bag, or stuck to the side of a shelf where nobody looks. That is not a criticism of the design. It follows from being a single-purpose object that is only needed at the moment you use it.
ANKOR has a job even when empty: a dock where you already set your keys down, holding the phone the way a coat rack holds a coat. The phone has an address. Coming home means the phone goes to its address, and that happens whether or not you were thinking about your screen time when you walked in.
The practical result is that ANKOR gets used on days you were not planning to use it. A puck in a drawer does not.
What you are willing to have on the wall
A blocker only has to work. A dock has to work and be worth looking at, because it is mounted in a room where you live and other people see it. That constraint drove the material choices: aluminium and walnut or solid wood, a finished edge, hardware you can point at without explaining it.
This is where the two products stop being alternatives. Brick is a tool, priced and designed as one, and there is nothing wrong with a tool. ANKOR is furniture that does something. An object that embarrasses you goes in a drawer, and in a drawer it does nothing at all.
In a real room
Put ANKOR where you already stop. For most people that is the entry wall, at roughly the height you would hang a key hook, close enough to the door that setting the phone down happens on the way past rather than as a separate trip.
The kitchen is the second place worth considering, because dinner is the block of time most people say they want back. A dock at eye level near where you cook keeps the phone visible and reachable, and out of your hand.
What does not work is mounting ANKOR in a room you rarely enter, on the theory that distance equals discipline. Distance you have to plan for is distance you stop covering after a week.
Where each one fits
ANKOR is built for the hours you are at home. The dock is fixed to one wall, and that is the point: the phone has a spot, and the spot does not move. Take the phone along and the apps stay quiet until you tap ANKOR again at home.
A puck travels. If most of your difficult hours happen somewhere other than home, a device that goes in a bag covers ground a wall dock does not. For those hours there is ANKOR Go: at home in its frame, along if you really need to.
Households on mixed phones are no obstacle any more: ANKOR’s app runs on iPhone and on Android.
Questions
Can I use Brick and ANKOR together?
Yes. Brick is small enough to travel, so it covers hours away from home, and ANKOR covers the hours you are in it. If you already own a Brick there is no reason to retire it.
Does ANKOR need Wi-Fi?
No. A session starts over NFC, which is a direct exchange between the dock and the phone. Your phone still needs its own signal for whatever apps you use during the day, but the dock does not connect to anything.
Is there a subscription?
Neither product needs one. ANKOR is bought once and the app is free with your ANKOR. ANKOR Member is optional. It is worth checking on any phone-boundary product you consider, because some in this category do run on an annual fee.
What happens in an emergency?
Calls always come through. For everything else, hold the phone to the dock a second time and the session ends. Lifting the phone on its own does not end it, so the apps you chose stay quiet until you scan.
Which one should I buy if I only want my evenings back?
Either will do that. Choose Brick if you want the cheapest object that performs the function and you do not mind where it lives between uses. Choose ANKOR if you want the phone to have a permanent place and would rather not think about starting a session at all.
Is ANKOR available on Android?
The Android app is on Google Play, for Android 7.0 or later.
Neither of these is about willpower.
Brick makes the phone harder to use. ANKOR gives the phone somewhere to be instead, also on the days you never think about the phone at all.
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