If Ryan Orbuch’s high school had senior superlatives, he would have likely received “Most Likely to Start a Billion Dollar Company.” But Orbuch wasn’t around much his senior year of high school. At 16, he won Apple’s Design Award for his first startup, a productivity app called Finish[1]. At 18, he founded his second company Volley[2], an AI-powered education tool. Now, at the ripe old age of 21, he's launching his third project—a new app, called Feedless[3].
Each of Orbuch’s projects have followed his stage in life. Finish was “the to-do list for procrastinators,” conceived during finals week of his sophomore year of high school. Volley, a learning tool for autodidacts, launched shortly after he decided to opt out of college. The App Store was created a month before Orbuch’s 12th birthday, and in many ways, he’s spent his entire life thinking about apps as the way to solve life's problems.
So it’s noteworthy that Feedless is something completely different. It’s an app, but one designed to save us from apps. It blocks the feed from social media websites like Facebook and Twitter on Safari for iOS, leaving just the bare bones of those apps. The goal, Orbuch says, “was to remove the most time-sucking feature of social media and leave all the useful stuff like messaging and events.”
Feedless launches on the App Store today, just as the national conversation around social media’s dark side[4] seems to be coming to a head. Researchers are exploring links[5] between social media use and depression in young adults. A coalition of technologists called the Center for Humane Technology is leading an awareness campaign[6] about how social...