Before installing all those apps the author listed, I'd recommend this exercise:
Let the battery die on your phone, and live one week without it. Cold turkey. Tell people in advance if you need to, give them an alternate way to reach you. Replace your phone for that week with a small notebook that fits in your pocket.
During that week, every time you want to do something that requires a smartphone, jot it down in your notebook. Then, fifteen minutes later or so, write down what you did instead.
After a week, you're ready to start using your smartphone again and turn it into a so-called "dumb phone." Read your notebook and think honestly about which things you really needed to do, and which ones weren't such a big deal after all.
I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.
There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.
This is the way. I've spend few weeks back a wonderful time on remote islands in heart of Sulawesi, Indonesia. I even bought sim card for the operator that was supposed to have some coverage there (to stay connected a bit with kids back home). Suffice to say no phone signal for week and a half, I don't mean internet, not even sms.
Pretty amazing, one focuses on actual adventures, people, food, culture, coral marine life, diving and so on. It felt like spending 2 months there.
Then coming back to all this cheap pathetic crap was a proper 'bleh'.
I switched to a candy-bar style dumb phone for a month and did something similar. My list was pretty much the same as the one in the article with a few small changes.
The most jarring was probably maps - other things like email, messaging etc could be delayed until I could reach a computer but not knowing how to get somewhere right now was problematic and required planning in advance.
I usually kept my smart phone in my car and did a sim swap on the occasion that I really needed it.
same experience. switches to an old school dumb phone. my neighbor joked that I was a drug dealer, lol.
but man did I miss maps. need to go somewhere? get in the car, start the engine, look it up on some map app, and then I'm off.
text messaging and being able to send simple photos was also a loss. definitely missed being able to text the wife a photo of something on sale in the grocery store ("hey, 10% off X, wanna give that a try for dinner?"), and I missed how good some of the auto-fill was after a while.
to a much lesser degree, a phone was nice during some downtime. waiting in line for something, killing time in a doctor's office waiting room, etc. 20 years ago they had magazines, now they don't...
eventually after getting lost a couple of times I just tapped out and went back to the Pixel 4
Normalize checking notifications 1-3 times per day.
Once in the morning, once after work, once some time later in the evening if you feel like it.
During working hours there’s rarely any reason to touch or check your personal phone (and in many professions you simply aren’t able to).
During after-work hobbies and/or family time you are for obvious reasons unable to have your phone on your person (it’s in a locker room, or you’re playing with your kids) or unable to pick it up (any creative or performing arts, or you’re having family dinner).
I have reasons to believe that my sister works like this. We joke that she has "office hours". She will rarely answer messages or calls that she does not expect right away. Then at around eight in the evening, every other days or so, messages will start trickling in.
At first it was a bit annoying, but once you know that she works like that it perfectly fine. I'm starting to think that she's doing modern communication correct.
I've had this for years but it makes me check my phone more often I think. At times I find myself cycling through apps to see if someone replied, whereas if I had a notification I'd know whether or not to bother
Author here: this is exactly what had me turn on notifications for email. I first tried without it, but found myself "checking on important responses" way too much.
> This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).
Tbh, (imho, having tried it) in normal circumstances it would be a miracle to make anything really work like that, but at present you're just fighting a losing, nearly irreconcilable battle, unless you're both wholly on the same page about infrequent synchronous communication.
If a relationship relies on immediate responses to async, unpredictable, text-based communication, and what you want is a sane lifestyle, it's going to be a tough situation.
I just tell people that need my attention how to get it. Call me if it's important and/or time sensitive, otherwise I'll just check when I check based on the implied nature of the platform. Instagram is super casual unimportant brainrot usually, Messenger for coordinating plans with older millennials and Gen X family, Whatsapp for younger millennials sometimes, SMS or RCS is slightly more important and I'll get visual but not physical or audible notifications. I make it clear that if it's a group chat, I'll turn notifications off unless I'm specifically tagged, or maybe check in once a week if it's for a specific purpose, but otherwise I hate them. Signal for some things that aren't time sensitive, no notifications, no read receipts on any platform.
> They will perceive your lack of response as you not prioritising them.
And correctly so: you are prioritizing people that contact you in the normal way (via phone calls).
If I send you a text message, it's usually because I don't need an immediate reply; answering me tomorrow is good enough. If I do need a faster reply (if I'm texting an image or some such, or in a noisy place), I'll make a call afterwards, just long enough to set off your ringer so you hear it.
I also deal with notifications in a different manner: I have different ringtones and extensive notification filters set up. Most of my apps will not make any noise with a notification while the screen is off. Most notifications will not show up on the lockscreen. Most notifications will not show up in the status bar. My standard ringtone is an mp3 with a short quiet ring and a long pause before it ends, so while I do get call notifications they're easy to ignore; only important contacts (family) are allowed to bubble or pop on top, and they also get a different ringtone.
I dread migrating my phone, as none of this can be backed up. I changed phones last year and still find the occasional app that I forgot to blacklist notifications for and never noticed because things related to https://dontkillmyapp.com simply prevents it from running altogether when I haven't used it in the past couple days.
One aspect of no phone is how to deal with payments. Specifically UPI payments in India. These are QR code based payments and it is getting more difficult to pay by cash at many locations.
Right next to that is OTPs from financial institutions.
On the way towards the same issue in Vietnam. You can still pay with cash everywhere but it's becoming more and more normal to use QR codes. I guess in the next year or two I'll start to see places that only take QR. It's very convenient... unless you don't have a local bank account, or your phone runs out of battery, or, as happened to me 30 minutes ago, your bank's system goes down.
That would be a great idea if I were on vacation in a cabin in the woods. But realistically, I need my phone for just about everything I do on a daily basis, from payments, to navigation, to communicating with friends and family, and logging into accounts for work.
At least a few of these, like payments and basic communications, can be done from a watch.
Work accounts, camera, and maps are the big blockers for me. I know I can buy a camera but 90% of the times when I take a photo it's to instantly send it via a messaging app, mostly for work.
I do use Reddit and YouTube to follow topics related to work. And to some degree Hacker News as well. Come to think of it, these are the apps that make up for most of the screen time usage for me.
I think a middle ground version of this is possible, e.g. instead of letting your battery die, reset the phone to defaults and don’t install anything with the exception of critical communication apps.
Run the rest of the experiment as described for other categories of use.
Some people have family juggling/concerns that requires frequent contact (usually involving children being remote places).
There are many, many, not so strange reasons that someone might need to maintain contact. Thinking it's not possible suggests a very naive perspective.
I turned my iPhone into pure utility device by uninstalling all the entertainment apps. I only allow music and podcasts as those don’t require my active attention.
Then I have an iPad mini at home which has all the entertainment and social media stuff installed. However I don’t have many opportunities to use that device during the day..
After maybe a week of having this arrangement I found myself being less and less interested in grabbing that iPad. It’s been few months now and I only check my socials maybe twice a week.
Also since I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Threads, YouTube and TikTok from my phone the battery life almost doubled. It was eye opening to see how much these apps drain battery even when the device is left untouched.
I now regularly force myself to "actively" do nothing for 15 minutes and just think.
All the things I put into my brain as "todo, please remember" at some point in time are coming back during these 15 minutes.
I get quite a lot of clarity with this exercise.
As soon I pick up my phone afterwards and start browsing the clarity evaporates which feels bad.
So wasting time on my phone becomes less and less appealing to me.
Lets see where this leads me.
I so far wasted quite a bit of time with my phone.
Damn this really rings true to me, and makes me deeply wish I had my own office again. There are advantages to a cubicle environment but the noise means headphones which means distraction.
I never found a reason to buy a tablet but it seems that you have given a very good one.
Moving all the distractions to another device that I can't carry around with me is a great idea and I'm going to try it! Thanks Miika!
This is what i do with the tablet i have. Its an Android tablet, but de-googled with a spoof account. That way i can play games / apps and not have any account tried to it.
I can easily listen to podcasts while doing household chores. Most podcasts aren't that information-dense anyways and while retention isn't perfect, you get an overview of a topic and can still dig deeper (or not) later. Or to flip it around: most podcasts don't give you that much benefit anyways.
YMMV but I sometimes listen to a podcast or audiobook while playing mindless video games. I can't watch a show while playing video games, since I need to actually watch the screen. Since the game doesn't require mental thought, I can still pay attention to the content of the podcast.
This is exactly what has worked for me as well. Before this, the iPad was rotting in a corner for years, because the phone was just always available and I had consumed everything on the phone already, obliterating the need for the iPad.
I deleted all social media as well, but I did keep YouTube (NewPipe, that is) with a curated list of subscriptions and no auto-suggestions/trending/shorts. I find many interesting things there.
I haven't had any of those apps installed for years. It's using the web versions in my browser that kills.me, because I can't get by without a browser.
Stay logged off in the browser, don't carry (unique, complex) password around if you have to.
But this is desperate level of proper addiction, when serious hard look at one's life is by far the best course of action. Professional help is not a bad idea neither. Life can be pretty amazing, but screens won't get you there, in contrary its cheap basic addictive 'fun' for poor.
Many years ago I removed all FB apps and messenger from my phone (due to their crappy engineering their constant snooping of user's activity was, draining batteries fast even when not using them). Have them on desktop only. Pretty amazing move, can't recommend enough.
There is something magical in 2025 to practically disconnect from all the social noise. But one can't be total piece of s*it who can't stand themselves of course.
I am experimenting with using freedom.to to block social media in the browser. It creates a VPN profile that blocks these sites in the browser (it also uses the Screen Time API to block specific apps). The downsides are that you can just go into iOS settings to disable the profile, and I am paying Freedom a subscription for something I could set up for free. The upside vs. managing it myself is that it's much easier to create a schedule (eg block during weekdays, instead of block 24/7).
I use Burnout Buddy, it can block both apps and websites, you can set up custom rules, time based, usage based or triggered by Shortcuts (for instance I have one set up to block Reddit when I enter the gym).
Just want to say I was looking for something like this the other day that didn’t feature an obscene subscription and I’m very glad you made me aware of this app. It’s lovely and free!
You can block them on dns level. That's what I did when I wanted to stop wasting time playing 2048. (Not sure how to configure DNS on phone, I was using PC to play at the time)
I have NextDNS profiles on my phone and PC that block problematic sites, as well as the settings dashboard itself to stop me touching it unless I'm on my tablet.
+1 for NextDNS.
Last week I experimented with building a Brick[0]-like solution from my Android phone, by using an old badge I had lying around acting as an NFC trigger to launch a Tasker automation that enables/disables filtering profiles in NextDNS via REST API.
It's working nicely, although it takes a while to effectively enable/disable filtering, I assume because of DNS caching on the phone.
Also sometimes I actually need YouTube/Reddit/Instagram/etc. to look up something, so for now I settled on the slightly less nuclear option of using ScreenZen[1] to make my app opening a tad bit more mindful. I sometimes found myself going around the restricted app opening count/time limits by using my iPad, but overall my mindless screen time is decreasing, so I don't stress it too much.
I don't have any issues with notifications really as I usually set them up to only receive what I deem important from the get go when I install a new app, and I also have Do Not Disturb and Routines enabled most of the time, plus a smartwatch to take a quick glimpse at messages if needed.
My workaround for this is to always log in from porn/incognito mode where it doesn't remember cookies. Each time I have to type password and go through 2FA.
iPhones have a website blocking feature built in. It's possible to set up separate time limits for different websites. Setting a limit to 0 effectively block the site. Ask family member or a friend to set the pin for you and you're set.
They made this for people with cognitive disabilities, but it also works great for older people. It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours. I realize I'm describing something actually doable in the interface now with focus modes and just holding myself accountable by deleting apps like Tiktok, but I do like the idea of having a way to enforce it.
> It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours.
Not an iPhone, but my solution to this is LineageOS + microG, where I just disable push notifications when I'm not working, or enable them for just the few select apps if I am expecting some messages there. The price for this is that I don't always receive the social app message when it is sent, but that's fine by me.
Plain Android has work profiles that will allow the user to enable/disable a "work profile" at will. This is what I use because we have on-call duties and on most weeks I don't need to be available on my work accounts.
> I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example.
So do I, but I certainly don't need them on my phone. For the longest time the only work app I had on my phone was some 2FA thing. Then asked them to either buy me a phone or a yubikey. I got a yubikey (and my phone complete free from anything work related).
I tried this for a bunch of work apps that require 2FA. They pushed back hard enough where I was threatened with getting written up. I relented and installed MS Authenticator on my personal phone.
I'm still bitter about the intrusion of work stuff on my personal phone.
I absolutely hate Microsoft authenticator. Why does it need its own app? Google Authenticator, Auth Apple Passwords, freaking Aegis, everything works with TOTP and piece of shit Microsoft has to go off and do its own thing like that nonsense Duo.
You can actually use an alternative authenticator app for Microsoft logins. I use Aegis on my phone for it.
They don't make it clear in the messaging during the sign-up flow, which just says Microsoft Authenticator everywhere. But when you proceed through the steps to get a TOTP code for Microsoft Authenticator, there's a step with a link to something like "I want to use an another authenticor app", which presents a QR code for any generic TOTP app.
I've done this as well. My employers setup guide was super long winded and tried hard to suggest MS Authenticator was the only one that would work without outright saying it.
However, I've gathered that this is a setting that is up to the organization so your YMMV. Since some employees work at secure sites without wifi/mobile connections they aren't able to turn off TOTP.
I realize it is amusing to even consider offloading OTP generation to a web browser extension however, if `$work` doesn’t want to provide you with the correct hardware (e.g. Yubikey, NitroKey, etc.) there are boundary-respecting alternatives
I don’t know if this would work for you, but I’m personally using 1Password on my laptop to generate 2FA codes. It worked even on Microsoft services, after clicking through lots of alternative settings, although some employers might disable that if they insist on push 2FA not just TOTP.
If your work-style is butt-in-seat for 8 hours having everything on your laptop probably works. For folks with a more meeting-heavy workload, having at least your work calendar/email/messenger on your phone is pretty hard to go without
Why are you on your phone during meetings and not paying attention to the meeting? We ban phones/laptops for the specific reason of people attending and not paying attention.
I like Assistive Access, but my biggest issue is that you have to click like 100 times to read any notification. No option to just be able to read a text from the home screen. I found it was even more friction (for my use) to unlock my phone constantly than the regular format.
This. The I feel the significant nerfing of important functionality in the Camera app (as an example) suggests assistive access isn't geared toward the general folk like myself.
> Consider email. I still need to have access to email, and I want to have notifications enabled so I don’t miss something truly important. But 90% of the emails I get aren’t important.
I was at a talk at FOSDEM this year and they were talking about how most emails now (over 90%) are transactional in nature and not personal. Things like password resets, offers, 2fa, shipping confirmations.
This was a lightbulb moment for me - for years I'd been trying to fight email by using sieve to filter away the most annoying senders and subjects but they're right - almost all email doesn't deserve your immediate attention.
I switched my method to whitelist. I created a folder called Transactional and everything goes in there. Then I started whitelisting certain email addresses to let them get to my inbox. I have around 20, and for the first time in years I'm at a point where I could have notifications for my inbox. I still don't, but they'd be useful now
Agreed. Many years ago I set up a personal email address for that very reason, i.e. one through which I only expect personal 1-to-1 correspondence, and which I only hand out to family & friends, never to companies (which easily get hacked and/or one day decide to reuse your email address for their newsletter).
I have one of those personal correspondence email addresses, but someone got "hacked" and their address list was scraped, and now I get spam to that address.
Gmail's magic algorithms are notoriously unreliable. When they work they work, but when they don't, they really don't. And you won't know, because them not working means you won't get any kind of notification they don't work.
I've gotten direct responses sent to my spam. I've gotten emails, WITH ATTACHMENTS, sent to my spam from a known email address. Its a good thing I check my spam. Many (most?) don't.
Seems like most people have just decided that email is for receipts, bills, and spam. And real messages are sent over IM apps where there are no automated messages and everything is worth reading.
Except gmail pretty unexplicably filtered away stuff like a direct response from my boss, to an email I specifically sent to him half an hour ago. After a couple of these hiccups, plus hours spent trying to locate emails that I knew existed and even knew the right keywords for, I just disabled any and all of their filtering (which is, unsurprisingly, not just a checkbox...) and access gmail exclusively through Thunderbird.
It's inexplicable to me how google, of all companies, can be so consistently shit at search across all their products.
Although it really does, the algorithm is outside your control and scrutiny. An artisanal white list is totally under your control, and fully portable. Break the shackles.
This is the main feature I miss from leaving Gmail. 99.9% of email is complete junk not worth ever opening, let alone getting a notification about.
This is probably where I can see the most value from LLMs, the ability to filter all of my emails by urgency without distracting me with notifications from newsletter spam.
This is exactly why I pay for hey.com email. Every new address is screened in and I can turn on notifications for specific addresses or domains. I have notifications on just a tiny handful of addresses and it's perfect for me.
I've gone from ignoring my email for weeks at a time and fighting with spam to quickly checking my email every day now.
If google weren’t such an ass about your data you could download everything and run some queries to see how you should create your rules
What is sending you the most emails? What emails did you actually care about?
Yes yes, you can do this technically speaking, but good luck actually trying - everything is so slow and old emails with attachments will simply not download - they won’t load even in the UI sometimes
For me, I did what you did except with a new email address
That address has notifications and they are reserved pretty much for just people - I don’t use it for websites at all - I only give to people whose email id like to see right away
I have every gmail email I have ever gotten plus attachments downloaded to my Thunderbird client, it is incorrect to say that Google does not let you access that data. They let you do a full sync and use whatever client you want.
I never said they don’t allow it, they even have something called google takeout actually that makes it a bit easier
Yes, one way of doing this is to turn on an email client and let it run on your computer for hours and hours to download everything
The problem is that unless you’ve done that incrementally since the beginning, going back and doing it now is unreliable. The take process above is your best bet and probably the best you can actually do, but outside of that there’s nothing that works well
I’ve even written gscripts with different approaches to do it and it always ends up petering out no matter how careful I am
Also, I think some attachments are permanently corrupted because my apps, whatever the app, always hangs when I try to download them
Anyway, this could be made a lot easier if they actually wanted to let people do that
If anything, it’d be great if they had a tool to do it to begin with - I’ve had my account for over 20 years now so just downloading everything is no small feat
I set up new computers somewhat frequently and have never had any issues downloading the entire 20 year old email-never-deleted mailbox from the server, including attachments.
I will also point out that free email is not something that should be expected to be a scalable storage service.
That said, the times I’ve encountered this, when the import doesn’t actually fail and appears successful, I still can’t access the specific attachment I’m looking for
It could be an old picture that is probably gone for good but forever shows loading… in the ui
Interesting idea to use Apple Configurator, I like it! I use a combination of uninstalling any interesting apps + Foqos + One Sec + grayscale.
This works pretty well for me, and the key part is Foqos, which is FOSS that allows you to disable certain apps or features with the scan of a QR code or NFC tag. I keep the QR code / NFC tag in a separate building or locked box, so there's real friction if I want to scan it to use the phone beyond basic functionality.
Like the OP, I also have the issue of "semi-important" things, which is mostly email but occasionally some browser thing (often buying or viewing event tickets.) My plan for that is to use Foqos in combination with a QR code + scratch-off sticker, a sort of "break glass in emergency" option that adds some friction but not too much. Print a sheet of identical QR codes, scan it into Foqos as your unlock option, put stickers over them, cut them out and put them in your phone case.
greyscale is a game changer. i wasn’t a believer until i forced myself to use it, but it really turns off the appeal. have you ever seen someone just staring at their phone and flipping through the home screen(s)?
The active readers counter is a trip. I’ve read and viewed graphs depicting how much traffic HN can bring to a web page, but to see it in real time is something else.
TBH, it's kind of hard to square "I locked down my phone to have less distractions in my life" with "I put a counter on my page that changes 10 times a second while you're trying to read"
My charitable suspicion is that this blog post is all some sort of esoteric way for you to show off your nifty technology. If it wasn’t for your robust catalog of previous writing I’d be more confident in this.
But whatever the case is, you hit on something right here!
Thank you for the kind words about the nifty technology and the essay : )
You know you touch on something interesting. I feel like the best 'marketing' or 'networking' happens over decades. Of course this implies that best 'marketing' and 'networking' are often done for a different goal entirely.
I noticed this in my career. I've always been interested in programming and writing, and it would bring me to ask people random questions over email. I'd find myself connecting with the same person 10 years later, and we'd help each other out in some way.
My wife and I put parental controls on each others' phones. I turn them off for travel (in case I need something unexpected) and then back on when I get home. It sounds crazy but it works great.
In the fight against "Weapons of Mass Distraction" I went to a Qin F21 Pro and used ADB to remove everything distracting.
This might be a way back to the iPhone for me though.
I strongly identify with the author's feeling that their phone had a kind of "gravity" before removing these apps. I described mine to somebody as the sense I was carrying around the ring of power in my pocket. It felt heavy.
If you are in a room full of people and you close your eyes, you still feel the presence of those people and your self-consciousness is thus mobilized.
There is something similar going on when I have a phone full of apps. Even when it's off, I can still sense their presence and some part of me is still online, idling and using resources to account for that.
> So far the only real unsolved issue I have are related to “semi-important” apps. Consider email. I still need to have access to email, and I want to have notifications enabled so I don’t miss something truly important. But 90% of the emails I get aren’t important.
> I am not sure what the solution is to these kind of apps. Maybe I can find a special mail app, that only shows you important emails. If I had something like this I think I would just be over the moon with this setup.
I have always had email notifications turned off and I was always missing important emails, especially from people I cared about. I finally figured out the solution. In Gmail (only tested on Android, can't speak for iPhone) I created a label called "notify". I then created filters for specific emails and words that apply the label. You can turn on notifications in Gmail (for Android at least) for specific labels. That's it! Maybe someone else can confirm that this can be done on the iPhone Gmail app? or something similar
I have some issues with this guide. I find it very odd how the very first step of the guide is to “erase all content and settings” but it doesn’t really mention all the caveats around this. There really should be warnings or a separate guide about doing this safely because if some people do that, they could lock themselves out of MFA-protected accounts.
Lastly, about Apple Configurator, it seems like it only works on macOS, so probably this won’t work if you have an iPhone but no macOS device, right?
We are close to the “we should put a warning label on the microwave that don’t dry your cat in it”. At some point it’s not a blog authors responsibility to make you understand that “erase all content” erases all content.
Well I sort of feel that many years ago before MFA was suggested or required for many different sites, it was less risky for a typical person to erase all content.
I took an easier path. I carry two phones - a smartphone and a dumb phone. The smartphone is usually turned off, and is only charged once every 3-4 days. It holds its charge. The dumbphone is actually a second-hand Sony Ericsson Walkman phone which I really love. It has basic web browsing, some very basic utility apps and excellent sound quality, which I care a lot about and bluetooth too. This physical, non-software based friction is what helped me cure my addiction.
If someone wants to contact me urgently - they drop a regular SMS or simply just call me. This also helped me separate my personal life and work life really well where clients can reach me on WhatsApp or elsewhere only when I'm on my laptop. Other times, if it's an emergency, they can always just call me.
I don't use Facebook or other social media on my laptop anyway, so it's nice to have when I need to access something (like marketplace). But other than that, the peace of mind is truly worth the hassle of carrying two phones.
I had a two phone lifestyle as well for different reasons: I needed car play but don't like iOS, and also needed to know Android and iOS quite well for my job.
One iPhone that was wifi only, had my entire music library local, used for car play and a few exclusive apps.
One android with a sim that had my communication apps, social media, and some custom tinkering stuff that doesn't exist on iOS.
I did this for about two years. The main takeaways:
-I 100% could have just had the iPhone with a sim for communication apps and been fine. The social media was just annoying enough to swap to that I never felt that draw and barely used it on 2phones.
-even though I despise how little customization iOS lets you do, without social media or game apps, the only actual pain point with it was the nightmare of managing notifications/alert/vibration/screen wake settings*
-god it made me miss small phones so much. The android was a pixel 4a, the last real phone with real hardware that released at the actual ideal size for my hands(that has an unlocked bootloader, I really can't do the Samsung hellOS experience again).
Now Im on a pixel 8 only, with Glider for this site and no other social media or games. It's fine. Phones too big, car doesn't have AAuto, and Google is trying to rot the foundation of android, but for now it's fine and better than the two phone experience because it's less juggling.
I really like this setup. I think it balances friction and usefulness in exactly the way I've been aiming for.
Still, I have a couple questions about it, since I don't own an iPhone but am considering buying one soon.
1. How does this affect backup and restore? Could I still restore from a backup on a new phone, if needed? I've lost my phone while traveling before and buying a replacement was pretty seamless.
2. Is the ability to disable the profile bound to the Mac you use Apple Configurator on? I don't own a Mac, but if I could use a friend's Mac when I need to make changes this could maybe work.
I've been using the same setup as the author for about a year, I can help some.
1. I don't know, never tried this. I do know iCloud backups still work, because I've used them after wiping my phone. But I think you must plug the new phone into your computer and set it up as a managed device before you load the backup, or else parts of the profile might not take.
2. No, it's not. I traded in my old macbook pro for a mac mini back in May. I was able to use Apple Configurator on the new mac mini to change the profile on my phone. There is one caveat though -- the phone is still technically supervised by the old mac, so you have to confirm the profile by going into the phone's settings. Using the original, you just have to plug the phone in and unlock it.
Even if I couldn't restore the whole profile from backup while traveling (which seems natural), at least it's still possible to restore some data. Which should be enough in the short term.
And that's perfect that I could manage it from a different Mac. That totally works for me. I worried there would be something which prevented that. I'm imagining a parent using this for parental controls, but then the kid disabling it at a friend's house who has a Mac. Works better for my scenario though!
Thanks! Great idea to use configurator. Turning my iPhone into a dumb phone has been one of the best things I ever did. My relationship with my phone was weird (using it for distraction from anxiety, zoning out on it etc) and all this has gotten way better, I’m finding I can focus again. (I’ve set something similar up using an ad blocker app, but it was a bit of a hack.)
I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.
Wow thanks for the shout, I'm the maker of Dumb Phone! Always super nice hearing how much that set up has helped improve their relationship with their phone / tech in general and be more present every day. Thank you!
The configurator is interesting and something I haven't heard of before!
It's a double edged sword because the amount of time I spend online (X) has been directly responsible for the most valuable opportunities and generally knowing enough of what's going on to leverage that for big financial and career returns. It was pretty easy to drop all non-X social media though (all meta) and just avoid short term video generally.
I've been tempted to try the lightphone 3 though - theory being if I have a separate hardware device that might be enough to help because I can leave the iPhone at home. In theory the Apple Watch could do this, but in practice it hasn't.
Another thing I think can work is committing to avoid using it for one day a week - you get a lot of the benefits, it's more doable, and the downside is minimized.
Literally got my current job through a mufo on X, so I feel obliged to stick to it for the same reasons. That being said, I’ve curtailed a lot of my time on it and other social media. The results have been positive.
I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled. There is almost no email I get that needs instant action. The one exception is delivery notifications, so I can retrieve the package immediately, and I used a filter to get notifications just for those.
> There is almost no email I get that needs instant action.
Different people get different e-mails.
Also, some people just don't check e-mail otherwise. Why would they? Notifications tell them the 5 times a day they get a new e-mail, so they don't need to manually check their e-mail 2-3 times a day. It actually makes a lot of sense. Notifications mean you never have to check your e-mail.
I’m a little confused by these comments about not checking stuff unless you get a notification.
Do you get notified of every article on HN that you read? Or what about YouTube or other content that you consume?
I’ve had email notifications turned off for years, and have no problem checking my email once or twice a day, just to see if there’s anything worth reading. (Spoiler alert: there almost never is.)
Just like HN, and a couple forums that I visit. I’ll check occasionally to see what’s going on.
For all of these things, it’s never anything urgent or time sensitive. Even if I went a couple days without checking, it’d be fine.
If somebody needs to reach me for anything time sensitive (outside of work), there’s SMS (with notifications) or phone (of course, notifications).
I think much of the issue with these comments — and this whole thread, in general — boils down to:
1. People use things outside of SMS and phone for time sensitive things (solution: move time sensitive things to SMS/phone)
2. People overestimate the criticality/time sensitivity of these things sending notifications
I’d rather check my email (or other X app) once or twice a day, if that, and catch up on low priority things, rather than get interrupted 5-10 times a day for these low priority things.
> I’d rather check my email (or other X app) once or twice a day, if that, and catch up on low priority things, rather than get interrupted 5-10 times a day for these low priority things.
Nobody's saying you're wrong. That's great.
I'm just saying there are also people who are the opposite, and their way of doing it is also valid and works great for them.
Also, stuff on HN and YouTube isn't for you personally, and it doesn't need your reply, so it's not really an analogy for personal messages.
> I'm just saying there are also people who are the opposite, and their way of doing it is also valid and works great for them.
Agreed, but if we’re here discussing ways to reduce distractions of smartphones, I think auditing our notifications and the usage of apps that send notifications, particularly of things that are more noise than signal, is worth mentioning.
> Also, stuff on HN and YouTube isn't for you personally, and it doesn't need your reply, so it's not really an analogy for personal messages.
Fair point, but I’d bet that 90% of most people’s email is also not personal messages, and just more noise.
Yes, we should unsubscribe from the noise, and I have, but I still have some things I get that I occasionally care about, just not enough to be notified.
>I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled. There is almost no email I get that needs instant action.
People are different and have different use cases and needs.
i don't have them enabled; but, the email address I use for my Android phone and tables is used only for those devices.I've neer used my primary email address on a mobile device. Email can wait until I'm at a computer.
Email and chat apps are just about the only notifications I keep. I "archive" any unwanted email right from the notification screen, I report as spam anything I don't like. I hate people who have 4 digits in their email bubbles.
I really wish Apple/Google would do something about notifications, use AI for something useful.
"Hey you haven't read any of your 3454 emails, should I disable notifications for Gmail?"
"Hey you're drowning in notifications with your son texting you 2 hours ago, 4 pages down. Should I prioritize him maybe?"
Something like before launcher with filtered notifications gives you a list you can go through whenever. But they don't clear (your uber is getting close) and even then I often forget to check sms for 2 days
I don’t think that delivery service apps make you hooked on your phone. It’s high value information (assuming you care when exactly your stuff arrives) that you get quickly without distractions. IMO it’s less distracting than email apps (again, assuming you care about your emails).
I would never install one of these apps (more for security/privacy than information detox) but if Uber can abuse the notification system for advertising then it wouldn't surprise me if these companies would too.
Email and messages is the very few notifications I enabled on my phone. Reason is simple: I get very few of them, and most of them are either important, or if not, I appreciate knowing about it more than not knowing about it.
You can set email notifications (or any app) to deliver quietly. I made this change years ago for email and some social apps. You can go through the notifications when you check your phone but aren't distracted with it vibrating on every email.
Uhm. I set the email app to check for mail every 30 minutes. But also I don't get that many messages (and mailinglists and whatnot are filtered away to subfolders that don't trigger the notification) so when I get the notification is for something I actually need.
Apart from that I only have notifications for IM (telegram/whatsapp) and the phone is in constant DND mode (with sound allowed only for calls).
You can achieve the same more easily using Screen Time, and having a trusted friend or partner enter the screen time passcode. Still possible to override with your Apple ID, but this is a significant enough speed bump that it works (for me anyway).
I do this too, and have them set the recover apple id to their own. Been averaging ~1.2 hours per day screentime the last few months (mostly messaging apps).
Basically in "downtime" mode all the time with a few "Always allowed" app. One thing is, you're phone (and it's browser) is pretty damn useless. Overtime you realize that a lot of things you need to lookup don't need to be looked up, etc but it can be frustrating at first.
That's how my children's iPads are too. Permanent downtime, with a few always allowed apps, and the rest on demand. And indeed, the most frustrating part is when my daughter needs to do some research for school. I'd have to allow each and every website she visits, so I temporarily un-downtime her phone instead...
Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click). That's why I had to opt for permanent downtime.
Yeah it's usually trouble once a week. I recently needed to pay for parking using a QR code had to finish it in the 1 minute I had. Another appointment asked me to fill some online form and their reaction when I said "my phone is blocked from the internet" was funny. Turns out they still have paper forms when needed.
> time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click).
Huh, that's weird. Seems to work ok for mine in limiting their iPad use. They can request more time and I can decide to grant it or not, I get choices of 15 minutes, 1 hour or all day.
Agreed. Another issue I have is that the requests will randomly stop propagating from the kids' iPads to my phone. To fix it, I have to either reboot the phone or if that doesn't work, change the name of my phone.
I've spoken to quite a few people that do this which was very interesting, especially how a hard lock has helped them hard reset and start building healthier phone habits
the only thing missing from this setup is the ability to unlock remotely (as I can with my kids' devices). for some reason apple won't let an adult (fully) manage the screen time of another adult.
my wife has the password for my screentime, but i can't send her a request if we're physically apart. which means i'm out of luck, or she has to share the actual code with me, which then requires her to change it (and remember the new one)
The author says screen time limits are too easy to ignore. That is in a sense true. I "solved" that problem though by using a password to unlock the app. I however don't know that password, only my wife does. So whenever i need to use the browser, facebook or something i ask her to unlock it for me, often for like 15 minutes.
I don't think self control works that way. Every decision you make causes decision fatigue, which means that the things that you encounter constantly that nag at you and take your attention have a serious impact on your day-to-day. Like, say you have the energy to make 1000 decisions throughout the day. That includes dressing well, remembering to do things, eating well, making time for side projects, etc. Say your phone provides 100 times when you have to say 'no, I'm going to make the more difficult decision and not give in to this' each day. Well, that adds up.
I have type 1 diabetes, and there's studies about this on diabetics actually. There's a huge hit to quality of life and specific kinds of burnout attributed to the thousand or so extra decisions we have to make every day to manage our blood sugar. I'd love to get rid of those, but since I can't, I'm particularly sensitive to bullshit that takes my attention or willpower like that. In my experience, people don't live on a spectrum where "I have self control" = Everything that happens to me I make the right decision even if its hard or "I have no self control" = I always make the bad decision. There's always a pool of decisions, and the further you get into the onslaught of decisions the more you're beaten down and the worse your self-control is.
It is perhaps possible to attain a monk-like state where your will is absolute and you never make any compromises (although I doubt it), but since 99.99% of us will never get there, I think there's a lot to be said for cutting out things that nudge us in the wrong direction constantly
In an ideal world, sure, but there can be times where it's better to just lock yourself out.
Maybe breaking out of your phone is just more self-control than you currently possess. Imagine trying to get in shape but you're only allowed to lift 200+ pound weights - you simply aren't strong enough to even make progress, you need an easier task.
Or maybe you just have other priorities in the short-term. I'd love to get to the point where I can easily ignore my phone, but right now my priority is to finish unpacking after a move and getting back into the rhythm of going to the gym. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits: To break out of a bad habit, make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. Locking a phone down to barebones functionality does all three.
Finally, maybe you have a deficit of attention. I've had diagnosed ADHD since I was a child - my level of self control for addicting systems is significantly diminished compared to a "normal" person. Yes, a certain level of this learned behavior: With dedicated effort and practice, I can develop that skill and get better about distractions. However, my baseline is still lower and my progress will be slower than a neurotypical person. Crutches like this help me preserve mental energy for my day-to-day tasks instead of spending a significant portion of my mental energy fighting the urge to check my phone all day every day.
Just my perspective at least. I know everyone is different and I aspire to be the kind of person that doesn't need to employ blockers and safeguards just to ensure I don't end up getting sucked into doomscrolling for 2 hours, but right now I'm working with what I've got.
A good analogy is if you've ever tried to eat healthier and cut out most junk food from your diet. If you're anything like me, that is a LOT easier if you don't have a sleeve of oreos in the fridge and a quart of ice cream in the freezer, at least at first. Maybe after months and months of dedicated dieting, you can allow yourself to indulge in 1-2 cookies after dinner, but when you're first getting started, a cold turkey approach can be much easier, as you have to exercise a lot less willpower if the temptation isn't readily at hand.
It’s about setting up systems that help you succeed even if you are not perfect. It’s about facing the fact that you don’t always have enough self control, and minimizing self destruction when that happens.
I guess it’s like when recovering alcoholics, though ideally should just “simply” have self control, in reality it’s about removing booze from your apartment, getting rid of triggers, changing habits, friends, etc.
Say you want to quit sugar or smoking. Would you still buy cigarettes or chocolate and carry it around in your pocket everywhere you go because you should rely on willpower to beat the addiction? Very few people do that because you become vulnerable when your willpower is at it's weakest.
Usually it works better to exercise willpower to constrain your future self's available actions. For example, by not buying chocolate or cigarettes when you are at the store.
The same principle applies to your phone. Use your willpower to constrain what your future self can do with it.
I totally get that, but for me I'd rather put in controls that make it easy to do the things I want, a la Atomic Habits.
Like, I want to eat healthier. I can try more self-control to not eat the Oreos in the pantry, or I can stop putting Oreos there. Putting guardrails on my devices is just easier to help me live the life I want.
But this is an act of self-control, op is the 'self' setting up the system. The primary target is not compulsive instinct, but time on the phone, but the beauty is that this in turn, will remove the compulsive instinct, because it's brittle. It's like their analogy to eating healthy in the post.
Feigning victimhood and zero agency is very trendy in certain circles, and you evidently get bonus points for these sorts of performantive theatrics, versus actually adressing the core of the issue.
Apple actually finally managed to allow 0 minutes as a time limit. Screen Time really needs to be finished by Apple, with a few more features, like more allowing certain apps at certain times (not just disallowing one set of apps at a certain time).
If you're going through the hassle of reseting your iPhone to set with Configurator, you should think about pair locking your phone while you're at it:
I've been trying to do this too - paring down distracting apps, leaving only essentials like communication, maps, uber, etc. But my problem is what to do about the browser? I feel it's too essential to the "long tail" of uses (as the author put it), but also among the most distracting apps on my phone.
Something I've recently played with is a very 'dumb' android browser [0] able only to open and share links (and refresh the webpage), nothing else. Since I don't trust myself that I won't just click links from page to page I also configured the webview's client to disable links [1]. From this, you may be able to restrict yourself as much as you can since you could set a whitelist set of links you find 'indispensable'.
If on Android, you can propably use something like rethinkdns and just block the worst timewasting websites for a while. Once you get used to not accessing reddit, youtube, prawnhub, whatever your poison is, the browser becomes boring again.
What works for me, and this might not be palatable to everyone, is to intentionally downgrade my phone to a worse experience to add friction. I am currently using an SE 2020 on purpose. This thing overheats like hell, if I try to do anything too intensive with it it starts stuttering like crazy. But that's actually perfect, it's what I want. It naturally reduces my use time because it can get annoying to use.
One thing I sense the author is ignoring is the pretty LARGE swath of third party apps that do something of the like but in a much more user-friendly form factor. Most are targeted towards parents and teens, but surely there's no reason you basically couldn't use it on yourself. I'm thinking of things like Qustodio and the like. It should still allow you to massively restrict the iPhone, there's a little bit of friction involved with undoing it -- but not as insane as the entire iPhone reset -- and you can much more easily on the fly make custom changes to it as you go about it. I'd probably spring for something like that if I found screen time or self-control to be an issue before going full-in on something like configurator which I think would be very, very hard to iterate settings with.
I've been doing what the author did for about a year using Configurator. I have the browser blocked completely. I found that I could still get around it by sending messages to myself in apps like Messenger and using the built-in browser.
So I ended up using an allow list for internet traffic with nothing allowed, which stopped that. What do you find you need the browser for?
In the UK it has become very common to need to scan a QR code on your table to order at a restaurant, which takes you to a website.
Most certainly you can still order at the bar the old fashioned way, but since COVID, physical menus have been removed, so how is your group meant to decide what it wants to order before one of you goes up on its behalf? (You cannot all go up if you want to hold the table.)
I don't even particularly mind the experience of using the website; the interface enables the display of all ingredients & allows you to specify allergens they need to avoid. If the kitchen runs out of an item, they can mark it as unavailable in the webpage. Finally, fighting to order at a busy bar was never a fun experience to begin with (it is the norm in non-fine-dining experiences in the UK to not have your order taken at your table.) But, this does require you allow arbitrary internet access on your device, which complexifies the blocking situation.
Yes it's exactly the one-off situations like that, which aren't super often but occur enough to greatly inconvenience someone without a pocket browser.
The pattern that finally seems to work for me is to use Freedom to block all scrolly crap specifically on mobile. If I want to dig through YouTube or look something up on Reddit that’s fine, but I have to physically go to a machine that’s not always in my pocket.
At least so far I don’t need any of the things I’ve blocked on the go.
i've been using the blank spaces launcher for this. it has its flaws for sure, but the feature most useful for the scenario you describe is the "Lock Distractions" feature. In order to use safari, you have to go through a "mindfulness" exercise, and then you can unlock safari for a small amount of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, up to 20). I find this is just enough to keep me out of random wikipedia pages all day, but still allows me to pull up a webpage when i need to do some very specific task (like unsubscribe from an email list).
A small lock on the browser, something as simple as the math problems some people use to stop their alarm in the morning might be a sufficient stopgap from mindless browser use.
I vaguely remember someone here saying what worked for them was to add a fair amount of artificial lag to browsing, so that loading a page would actually be painfully slow.
I find the mobile web is doing a great job of destroying the addictiveness of the browser. I use an se2 so not terribly old. new reddit doesn't really work at all on it. old reddit just barely. Most other websites seem to hang after trying to load all the adware and never return the full content anymore. Some mobile websites just flat out don't load at all anymore, just a white screen like the phone rolled over and gave up.
Hacker news is about the only website that works. But, once you find a couple threads you are interested in you are rate limited from replying before long and that frustration kicks me off it until days later potentially.
Came to write something along these lines. I do this for restaurants, and sometimes for the places that refuse to take cash. But I do not have hope that such behaviour will impact the restaurants' policies: it's usually chains or non-owner-ran places that will have a "high-tech" policy and I am not sure if this kind of feedback reaches the decision makers.
But these days (for now) finding another restaurant is easy. The author mentions that his gym requires having a smartphone. Now, that's a much bigger problem.
I was at a gym once that decided they wanted to do facial recognition for check-ins. I canceled my membership instantly (and told them why). Am I out of touch, or is that creepy beyond all reason?
I am assuming that if you asked, they'd give you a printed menu. You don't have to be difficult about it.
I don't always need the dead tree version of the menu. Those do create extra work for the staff. And I am assuming they need constant replacement. Kids will drop food on them all the time.
Yeah it's definitely annoying. Recently I was at a kiosk for Turkish Airlines, and they _really_ didn't want to print the boarding pass. They wanted to send a text instead.
Thanks for this. I'm setting it up now, works for me as advertised. My screen time jumped a lot in the last couple weeks and my mental health has declined in proportion.
I use Freedom, but it's a bit glitchy and too easy to delete the app if you really want to cheat.
I'm waffling a bit on the default-deny approach to websites. I think that might cause serious headaches since e.g. scanning QR codes to interact with businesses is pretty common. But I will give it a try.
Update: it took me a couple hours to get everything set up the way I like it after resetting the phone, but so far this is fantastic. I also massively restricted notifications, which had gotten a bit out of hand.
2. Type random 4-digit passwords until you forget.
3. Use your own Apple account as reset.
4. Remove apple password from password manager. Store in “Notes” app or similar on computer.
5. Lock this app storing password behind mandatory typing of gibberish using Cold Turkey on desktop.
Works well for me.
I will mention that as a younger person who grew up with internet access, I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age or have fought them off and forgotten what it’s like to literally lose control of your actions, especially when its normalized around you.
I’ve noticed a lot of older people don’t see the internet as a threat in the same way as I do, and I envy that.
Living with phones like this is completely unnatural.
> I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age
I had the exact same mentality as you. I wrote the exact same stuff right here on HN, you can check my older comments. I did the same stuff, the lengths I went to lock down my devices...
That's not the case, older people are not immune because they grew up with less tech or anything. It's (probably) just you.
Turns out I actually objectively had far worse self-control than other people. Turns out I was living life really in hard mode while everybody else were coasting with ease. Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD all my childhood, nobody noticed because my school grades were mostly fine.
Go get checked. My life turned over completely with treatment.
I think this guide is nice, and having a variety of articles like this is great so everybody can look at the different ideas and find what's right for them.
I would urge people to consider going a little bit further than this guide, consider not using your phone as a reading device. Imagine deciding to sit down with a physical book, but keeping your phone nestled on the opposite page as you read. It would be a lot nicer to read without interruption, without being exposed to notifications at all times. Sure there are going to be use cases where the phone is more convenient, but I think sacrificing convenience is worth it.
I’m in denial about needing to curb some pretty bad habits so won’t comment on that.
But! I have a fairly “smart” home for controlling my lights, etc. I control it with Siri and the Home app. When friends/family with iPhones stay with me, I just add them as a guest.
Just left town for a few weeks leaving my home & dog to a sitter… with an android. I’ve got an old iPhone that I ended up doing all of the Screen Time/Parental Controls hacks to lock down to must a smart remote. I didn’t love the result. I’m looking forward to using the OP’s post to guide me in making a better dumbphone/smart remote. Thanks!
I'll shout out Clearspace[1]. They're YC W23[2]. I am in no way affiliated with them.
I find the app is very useful. I do find it still takes some discipline, but it adds enough friction into accessing pointless apps, that it makes a real dent in my doom-scrolling. It isn't cheap, but it works well enough that at the current price point, I will pay.
Using iOS 26 with the glassy-reflective elements feels like a storm in a teacup with making people even more addicted to their phones the moment they pick them up, observing all the shiny effects with a slight tilt of their wrist.
I wish Apple would open up customization capabilities to properly kick the addictive elements from the phone, like Android with custom launchers...
I've also experimented with Apple Configurator many months ago but unfortunately it's too tedious for most people wanting to enforce a simplified phone, but its beauty is in its level of power of creating a bespoke iPhone experience.
fwiw I'm the maker of the Dumb Phone app (dp) that somebody mentioned below and what's mostly kept my daily average screen time to 1-2 hours is getting rid of the addictive elements from the home screen.
No more color, icons, fancy wallpapers, just a simple single-colored text-based list of my most essential apps that open when tapped. Zero social media.
We live in 2025 and as much as i'd love to experiment with a nerfed feature phone, I personally need a high quality camera each day, maps of course, banking apps, authenticators, etc.
Kicking that dopamine hit has helped me use my phone as a utility again, otherwise I put it away. I have an Apple Watch too with all alerts turned off except for calls, texts - so another reason to keep the phone down.
Since I also run a business I do need to leverage mobile social apps, so these now all live on a "separate" iPhone which stays in a drawer until I need to perform a particular task with it, then it goes back in right away.
Genuinely feels good to have my phones work for me now rather than the other way around, and I see a lot of common sentiment when I speak to people who have also done the same thing to their phones.
Highly recommend cleaning up your Home Screen as a good starting point, and purge your notifications.
edit: I also begrudgingly installed Beeper last week to keep in touch with an important group chat on FB messenger on the main phone, but it's bliss only seeing a list of group messages vs the long list of story buttons along the top in the main app, green and red dots, so i'm not inclined to tap around afterwards.
What’s wrong with Screen Time and having your spouse define the PIN for it? I can request an additional minute myself, but after that only my spouse can grant me an exception.
You can also use an online time-lock service such as lockmeout.online to store the PIN for ScreenTime or assistive access (even better as it dumb down the UI).
Years ago I had this problem, but I didn't know about these services, so I had to keep the PIN data myself without being able to access it on a whim. I developed timelock for this purpose: https://github.com/rayanamal/timelock
"you can actually disable the App Store! This is a marvelous win."
I thought this one was weird, personally. The App Store is among those I use least on my phone. I only open it when there is a specific new app I want to install (which is rare; I have maybe a dozen apps installed that didn't come with my phone). I easly go months without opening the App Store.
Are there people just browsing the App Store daily?
Well if you disable App Store you cannot re-install apps you find distracting that you have removed. I actually remove Play store from my android through the debug shell for this exact reason. And yes, it happens that when all other apps are gone, things like Ebay, Foodora, App store etc are scrolled mindlessly, it's a hierarchy of stimulation, you remove one and move on to the next best one. Congratulations that you don't have adhd, it's hell
I think the idea is that you do not install time wasters (social media?) apps before disabling the app store.
This way, even if tempted, you won't be able to doomscroll on Instagram because you cannot install it.
I've been playing around with the idea of getting an old iphone just for car play and dumbphone purposes. However, I always discarded the idea due to the lack of control iOS gives you in restricting and customizing certain things. But now, this Apple configurator gives me a bit more motivation to make that jump, even though I probably wont be able to use it for all my specific needs.
I also ended up experimenting for a few months with the Samsung G1650 which runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow. I was able to get apps like Termux and other utilities on it which made my experience what I wanted while also not compromising on having no modern messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It wasnt a complete dumbphone per se, but it was almost impossible to doomscroll or browse the internet on that phone.
In the end I stopped using my G1650 due to the fact that it was too tedious waiting 5+ minutes for poorly optimized apps like Spotify/Taxi apps to load. Also, the phone became expontentially slower with more storage being used, which is expected since wasnt really made to storage gigs of message and media logs.
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
This is interesting because I suspect most people use their phone while doing other things. I’m in a meeting commenting on this article with my phone. I’ve got maybe 15min a day of “I’m only paying attention to my phone” but I have 4-5 hours of phone screen time. Maybe I’m unusual though.
You also accumulate screen time if you are using navigation while commuting, etc. I easily rack up 2 hours daily just from driving to my workplace and back home, so there are definitely some "passive" ways to increase those numbers.
I think focusing on numerical stats here is also a bit of a problem and while making these guardrails might help some people but the main issue should be addressed (overconsumption/addiction).
I wonder by reducing the screen time of the phone, how the screen time of the other devices (computer/tv/etc) changed.
Same here. I also "watch youtube" while doing chores, and the screen is on all the time, because while I mostly listen to the voice, sometimes they show things that I want to see immediately. A second use is that I'm monitoring something using my phone, so it sits around as a second screen basically.
Unfortunately some of us use Instagram specifically to keep in touch with people (IG DMs). and Meta does not seem to want to split off the messaging from the main app the same way they did with FB messenger for some reason (I would love it if they did). For Twitter, some of us need it for work as well (lots of interesting AI research published directly to Twitter). Reddit is definitely pure entertainment yeah. But there are nuances.
Twitter, I uninstalled the app and used via the browser for about a year until I finally gave it the boot outright.
Similarly, I felt I needed it to “keep in touch” with people, but I ultimately decided the psychic tax was too high to maintain some lukewarm friendships when I have perfectly good ones in meatspace.
This was a huge one for me. Remember spending so much time posting and reading twitter and insta feeds when I was in car with my wife. Totally different now. We talk and converse about what's going on with our kids, stuff at work, its way better. We both feel much more connected.
I also turned off all notifications from all my apps, period end of story. My battery lasts for days and its not completely distracting. Made a huge difference in my ability to focus.
I ended up doing this with Screen Time, but not knowing my own passcode. Having a partner or close friend is generally the approach I'd recommend, but you can also do this with iPhone Mirroring — I wrote up a how to guide in https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/setting-an-unknown-screen-t....
>installs e-reader apps, password apps, ridehailing/rental apps, music apps, gym apps, dev apps, home apps, "Your Internet Provider" apps (?)
???
I get that some of these are essential, but including home automation and gym apps is really pushing the definition of a "dumb phone". It just sounds like the author wants to avoid installing tiktok and games when he's talking about a "dumb phone".
Ultimately all of these apps were essential for me. "Your Internet Provider" is a funny one -- for some reason XFinity kept failing to charge my credit card. I would come home to find an angry girlfriend without WiFI. I had to install the app to keep some tabs on it, until their autopayment bug was fixed.
One thing I like about this setup is that you can decide which apps are 'essential' for you.
You know what, fair point. I deleted XFinity from my phone, and removed it from the essay.
I originally did this because the negative experience of losing the internet was really high, but on reflection I think I'll have other warning signs. They did try to call
Here's what worked for me - after trying screen limits, nokia phones
1. Remove all social media apps from iPhone
2. Use Opal in deep focus mode to block apps and websites (I can't exit the deep focus mode - but I allow myself a 2 hour window when deepfocus isn't active)
3. Keep my phone inside my bag - out of sight out of mind
4. Remove "tap to wake up" in settings - you'll have to click the side button to see the screen
5. Deleted slack and email - was hesitant about missing important notifications, but decided to try for a week and realized it made no difference to my work
> Maybe you’re at a restaurant and they need you to open a website for example. You may end up having to bug some people around you for their phone. It can be annoying but I haven’t found this to be too troublesome.
I have been using a profile-based restricted iPhone setup for about 6 months now, and this has been the biggest holdup for me. I've pretty successfully blocked almost everything distracting, but I'm pretty good at finding ways to bypass my restrictions. e.g., I'll find an alternative Reddit client (like Redlib) to bypass my Reddit blocks.
The obvious solution is to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist, but then you completely lose the ability to scan QR codes in the wild.
I'm thinking of building a browser designed for this purpose. Your browsing can begin at certain pre-defined entrypoints, like a news aggregator or a QR code, but you can't manually enter arbitrary URLs or use search engines.
They have menus. Every place I’ve been to (post-Covid) that tries to force the “use-your-phone” thing brought me a menu when I asked and said I didn’t have my phone.
I've tried so many things like this over the years and considered Configurator, but my only Apple computer at this point is a corporate Mac that blocks USB access to my phone. It's a great idea, and I'm glad to see it documented.
That said, the biggest shift I encountered in my own phone usage was when I got an Aro box [1]. It's expensive (I got one refurbished), but pretty, and functional, and it has made a HUGE difference in my phone habits. I no longer keep my phone in my bedroom and when I catch myself ignoring those around me in favor of my phone, I can hard cut that off by putting it in the box.
I like the idea of simplifying your phone with software tweaks like this, but I have found the physical separation to be the most freeing, and encourage that if you're interested in freeing yourself from the screen.
My idea to give my son a dumbed-down phone one day was to only install a terminal on it, and maybe chatgpt. And give him access to a server via tailscale. Then he could do whatever a terminal could do, except without the audiovisual or socialnetworking dopamine fixes. And retain all the basic phone functionality.
somewhat simpler but paid (but pricey at $10 month) solution i’ll shill for is Opal. only app i’ve used that can actually lock app, set time limits, etc w a pretty great UI and config setup
For those that are looking for something more advanced in the Android space a friend of mine built https://limitphone.com/ to handle something like this. It requires a reset, but comes with a lot more options.
Looks very interesting. The price is not good. I mean, we have to do it for 4 fones, that is 120 dollars per year, which is a lot of money, not in it's own, but it ads up with other subscriptions. The trial is too short, i think a months will be better.
I'm on the exact same journey as OP but I think I have a solution that is a little easier to setup.
Simply use Apple's Screen Time but lock all of the Screen Time settings behind a pin. Have a friend or loved one create the pin and keep it secret from you and voila.
With Screen time you can have an "Always Allowed" list and if you use the "Downtime" setting it doesn't actually let you set limits past a one minute exception per app.
You also have to make sure that the downtime setting is 24 hours of downtime.
*Edit: seems like a lot of people are suggesting the same exact thing.
Love this, I created Foqos which is FOSS (free & open source sw). The idea is to use physical switches like QR codes or NFC tags to block apps. Its free to try and just requires an install. Worth checking out if this doesn't work out for you.
So "dumbphone" now means "runs only a preselected by me set of apps"? I thought it meant "phone with no app functionality whatsoever, only capable of voice, text, and other basic cell network services"?
This is what I do as well. I actually see so much interest for this sort of "dumb smartphone" in some demographics that I seriously intend to start a company selling configured iPhones at some point.
Shout out to TechLockdown (not my company) for making this sort of setup much easier to accomplish.
For me, I can push through and not install the social media apps. I have noticed I'll start doing some other screen time activity like browsing HN more, or news site. The usefulness is higher but still am unable to trade off total screen time.
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
If you spend 4 hours/24 hours on your phone then every 20X you'll have lost 3.33... X.
I think the author is using year and waking-years but it doesn't parse well for me because you don't get close to 20 waking-years for every 20 years.
Could this be used as an alternative to Parental Controls? Appple's implementation of parental controls is so deficient that it gives me PTSD every time I need to configure it.
Author here: I think this could work great for parental controls. A really determined kid with a laptop or the willingness to factory reset their iphone could get around it. But outside of this I _think_ it's worth trying.
Well shoot. I just ordered a Mudita Kompakt (minimalist smartphone) to help tackle my phone addiction. Seeing the Apple Configurator allows me to define what apps can be installed and the ability to remove official apps such as Safari or the App Store, now I'm wondering if I just want to stick to my iPhone and do this or use my Kompakt when it arrives.
You can create and install a profile to (re)-enable it.
Just by default unless a profile (or MDM) solution allows "User Linked" activation lock (via Find My), the default is only to allow "Org Linked" activation.
The best use I have for dumbphones is install VLC to access the NAS music server or your favorite music stream service (I use radioparadise) and play on the stereo.
The Apple Configurator seems like a great tool to setup a phone for your children or tech illiterate elderly parents. Many of us would have people in our lives who might actually understand how to use their phone if the only icons on the home screen where messages and phone. I could imagine ChatGPT would be a good option for them to be able to look up information in the real world.
I have been doing this exact same thing for about a year, this guy is basically me! I love it so far. One difference with his setup, I also set up my Configurator profile so that I can only navigate to whitelisted websites, and I haven't whitelisted anything. This means I have no browser whatsoever (even the in-app ones, like in Maps or FB Messenger, don't work).
I did a CRTL+F for "Jamf" in this thread and didn't see it mentioned, but I would say if you're going through the effort of Apple Configurator then it makes sense to go the next mile and get some kind of MDM software that will make future updates and policies easier to apply.
As a bonus, if you're a parent and have kids it'll be very useful for them.
I don't understand the addition, and the gimmicks people come up not to check their phones.
Maybe it is because I was already an adult, when the very first generation of mobile phones became affordable, those that only did calls, SMS wasn't even part of it.
I can easily go out and leave phone at home, or don't feel the urge to check it every 5 minutes.
That’s great! Genuinely. We all struggle with our own vices.
I loved when I worked in a place with a beer fridge -chilling out on a Friday afternoon when it was sunny in Dublin was great - but for any alcoholics around it probably was hell. On the other hand, I hate it when places have free lunch and snacks because I am a compulsive eater.
One trick, even though it doesn't "lock it down" the same way, is to use a minimalist launcher. Check out OLauncher. It is a text-based launcher, it only has room for a few apps on the homepage, and it discourages fiddling with your phone.
https://github.com/tstromberg/quietude is how I manage my Pixel phone as well as my kids; I begin with “quietude.sh disable all”, but usually re-enable maps.
It takes a similar approach to the OP - changing restrictions requires a USB cable and a computer.
andoff[1] works well. I use it to lock down DNS settings to nextdns to block all the sites I want.
Then I use lockmeout[2] to lock opening andoff to change the settings.
Also there is limitphone[3], but it has less settings and is easier to uninstall than andoff, but works via the same mechanism.
You could also just ask a spouse or family member to set your screen time pw and disable safari. Install parental controlled browser like Spin Browser. And also disable image loading in the settings of Spin Browser. This was a small but significant factor in screen time. Just the images on websites! No more limbic over stimulation!
Are you using a desktop or laptop? I used to carry my laptop around with me to use whenever wherever as designed, and found myself always using it. Setting aside a dedicated desk space where I limit the use of the laptop made it much easier to just think of it as desktop and less mobile. Now, using it feels like I'm at work, and it is much easier to walk away from it.
Finding other things to do when bored instead of opening a browser is key. You're going to fill the time with something, so you have to find the something else.
There was K9 Web Protection but it was ended in 2019 by Symantec. It was perfect because after setting up password you had to wait one week to unblock it back again :)
You can try LeechBlock. It works as plugin in all browsers.
First thirty seconds are the worst for will :)
So it is better to ask a relative/friend/parent/spouse to set up a password for you - then you cannot unblock the sites back again without them.
What worked for me: working in person with others.
I found that it's much harder for me to procrastinate on my laptop when I am working with peers. The repeated focus time on the laptop during work hours 'conditioned' me to use it for work more.
I kind of agree with you in a way as I ultimately think that working remote is a bit harder on social health and maybe even physical health of getting out of the house, but in another way I just don't know if I can go back to all the negatives of the office.
I mean, my toilet at home washes my ass with gentle warm water. The work toilet randomly decides to splash toilet water on me with the violent "automatic" flusher after I'm done wiping myself with transparent sandpaper.
You don’t need the other person to be in the same room - a video call works just fine. In fact, it can be even better for productivity since there's less chit-chat.
It is my anecdotal experience that a whole bunch of my current friends are from a pre-pandemic in-office job and I’ve made zero lasting friendships at my remote jobs.
I did a “soft dumbphone” too: a Focus that only allows Phone/Texts/Maps/Camera. Screen Time has a passcode my partner keeps, and an automation re-enables the Focus if I toggle it off. Keeps utility, kills the slot-machine pull.
afaik installing a configuration profile isn't supported with lockdown mode, so you have to pick one. but neat hack. I've installed hosted-profiles (.mobileconfig) files without factory-reset, curious why didn't you go for that route? Just to make it harder?
That's interesting. I didn't know about lockdown mode. Noting!
> I've installed hosted-profiles (.mobileconfig) files without factory-reset, curious why didn't you go for that route?
Afaik the only way to disable the App Store is to go through this schlep of a factory reset and having Configurator prepare the phone for 'supervision'.
So you don't have to go through the factory reset if you are fine with having the app store? Safari is the only app I need to excise, and the OS won't let me delete it.
Strangely enough, I found Claude and ChatGPT crucial to making all this work.
In the essay:
> Whenever I need some information, I can just ask my LLM, and it can give me a distraction free summary. It helps the long-tail of weird situations too: for example if someone asks me to take a look at a website, I can ask my LLM to scrape it and summarize the details for me. It’s pretty hard to get distracted this way.
The only problem I see with this is that you can’t update your app if you disable the App Store. My bank updates its app annoyingly often, with no grace period - which is bad when you’re in a store and need to pay for stuff.
one underrated approach more and more people are finding success with:
apple watch ultra as a primary device (optionally with a case for a more phone-like factor)
you can do most things an iphone does, but you can't doom scroll. you don't have to eject out of apple ecosystem, you get payments, 2fa, navigation, notifications. your iphone can remain as a backup that's always in sync for when you need it (e.g. traveling)
Better to have a limited data plan like Roamless(data doesn't expire) and stock up on epubs. Then when your away from wifi all you can do is read books.
Oh, that's a cool idea! I think that would work. You would still need to connect to your laptop twice, to switch the profiles. Outside of that it could work great! Would have to think about what would make for a good 'travel across borders' blueprint.
If smartphones were real computers, instead of expensive little closed portable TV's with cameras, we could run multiple VM's, each with their own network ID's, accounts, apps, etc.
Maybe these sexy AI LLM's can help us root all these closed devices and OS's, instead of being used to write yet another stupid web app faster?
- Using AdGuard's pattern matching to block URLs I found distracting (news sites, youtuble)
- Deleted all apps I spend too much time on (basically down to Discord where I have two or three communities I check in on)
- Leaving my phones in the other room all day
- Turning all notifications off except for a very small select few whose (calls only) go through
- Deleting all social media (still have HackerNews (computer only), Discord)
It's great! Love it. Fuck your phone. I use mine to check bank accounts, do Spanish flash cards, and occasionally to look at housing and life is calmer and nicer and I get more done.
Mostly reading. The 2 hours was a win for me, but the thing I appreciated even more was the that I feel less distracted throughout the day.
I remember reading about Ozempic, and how it "turns off the background food noise" that people have. I didn't realize this, but for me I have a "background notifications noise", which this hack has helped reduce.
I don’t doubt it. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed with these addicting apps, I delete some temporarily and just the fact I don’t have them in my phone anymore feels like some part of my mind that was being dragged down is finally freed.
I just often felt like I wasn't making progress on various things I've been wanting to, that I used to do, and for which I kept telling myself I don't have time. And it wasn't difficult to tell where my time was going based on the Screen Time app.
For me, I've drawn the line at endless feeds, which for me, was Reddit and Facebook. And for the first week or two, I was often catching myself in a split-second of boredom just opening up one or the other (just to be greeted by an error message). Now that instinct is gone.
I don't think I was as bad as the people endlessly doom-scrolling through TikTok, but it was certainly bad enough that I felt like I didn't have enough free time to work toward life goals that were outside my work time. And it's a lot better now.
There’s another solution, much faster, it’s to use Screen Time and have your partner own the passcode. I hold my partner’s phone passcode and it’s fantastic to control when he’s allowed to doom scroll
> Seems like way more work than learning to be disciplined.
Are you disciplined about everything you need/want to be disciplined about? Food, exercise, sleep, reading, work, family... You've got it all dialed to a perfection, yes? If not, why not? It is after all easy to learn to be disciplined.
Before installing all those apps the author listed, I'd recommend this exercise:
Let the battery die on your phone, and live one week without it. Cold turkey. Tell people in advance if you need to, give them an alternate way to reach you. Replace your phone for that week with a small notebook that fits in your pocket.
During that week, every time you want to do something that requires a smartphone, jot it down in your notebook. Then, fifteen minutes later or so, write down what you did instead.
After a week, you're ready to start using your smartphone again and turn it into a so-called "dumb phone." Read your notebook and think honestly about which things you really needed to do, and which ones weren't such a big deal after all.
I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.
There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.
This is the way. I've spend few weeks back a wonderful time on remote islands in heart of Sulawesi, Indonesia. I even bought sim card for the operator that was supposed to have some coverage there (to stay connected a bit with kids back home). Suffice to say no phone signal for week and a half, I don't mean internet, not even sms.
Pretty amazing, one focuses on actual adventures, people, food, culture, coral marine life, diving and so on. It felt like spending 2 months there.
Then coming back to all this cheap pathetic crap was a proper 'bleh'.
yep, latest iphone has satellite texting that works almost everywhere. and soon t mobile is offering fully satellite data access :(
I switched to a candy-bar style dumb phone for a month and did something similar. My list was pretty much the same as the one in the article with a few small changes.
The most jarring was probably maps - other things like email, messaging etc could be delayed until I could reach a computer but not knowing how to get somewhere right now was problematic and required planning in advance.
I usually kept my smart phone in my car and did a sim swap on the occasion that I really needed it.
same experience. switches to an old school dumb phone. my neighbor joked that I was a drug dealer, lol.
but man did I miss maps. need to go somewhere? get in the car, start the engine, look it up on some map app, and then I'm off.
text messaging and being able to send simple photos was also a loss. definitely missed being able to text the wife a photo of something on sale in the grocery store ("hey, 10% off X, wanna give that a try for dinner?"), and I missed how good some of the auto-fill was after a while.
to a much lesser degree, a phone was nice during some downtime. waiting in line for something, killing time in a doctor's office waiting room, etc. 20 years ago they had magazines, now they don't...
eventually after getting lost a couple of times I just tapped out and went back to the Pixel 4
Out of curiosity, how often do you need to travel to somewhere that you don't know how to get to and haven't been to before?
I just have all notifications turned off permanently.
"But what about..?"
Yes, even that.
Normalize checking notifications 1-3 times per day.
Once in the morning, once after work, once some time later in the evening if you feel like it.
During working hours there’s rarely any reason to touch or check your personal phone (and in many professions you simply aren’t able to).
During after-work hobbies and/or family time you are for obvious reasons unable to have your phone on your person (it’s in a locker room, or you’re playing with your kids) or unable to pick it up (any creative or performing arts, or you’re having family dinner).
I have reasons to believe that my sister works like this. We joke that she has "office hours". She will rarely answer messages or calls that she does not expect right away. Then at around eight in the evening, every other days or so, messages will start trickling in.
At first it was a bit annoying, but once you know that she works like that it perfectly fine. I'm starting to think that she's doing modern communication correct.
Knowing there'll be a delay in response if you text also makes using your phone as a telephone have value again, too...
I've had this for years but it makes me check my phone more often I think. At times I find myself cycling through apps to see if someone replied, whereas if I had a notification I'd know whether or not to bother
Author here: this is exactly what had me turn on notifications for email. I first tried without it, but found myself "checking on important responses" way too much.
My phone is pretty permanently on silent and do not disturb. I have close friends on favorites so they break through.
I have about 10 third party apps installed on my phone
Chat, maps, ride share, music, study, and my car
Everything else i do is through the browser.
It’s great. If im on the bus and i want to watch slop, instagram web interface is fine lol.
I do this, but be aware that peoples expectations are that you reply quickly, especially the younger generation.
They will perceive your lack of response as you not prioritising them. This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).
> This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).
Tbh, (imho, having tried it) in normal circumstances it would be a miracle to make anything really work like that, but at present you're just fighting a losing, nearly irreconcilable battle, unless you're both wholly on the same page about infrequent synchronous communication.
If a relationship relies on immediate responses to async, unpredictable, text-based communication, and what you want is a sane lifestyle, it's going to be a tough situation.
I just tell people that need my attention how to get it. Call me if it's important and/or time sensitive, otherwise I'll just check when I check based on the implied nature of the platform. Instagram is super casual unimportant brainrot usually, Messenger for coordinating plans with older millennials and Gen X family, Whatsapp for younger millennials sometimes, SMS or RCS is slightly more important and I'll get visual but not physical or audible notifications. I make it clear that if it's a group chat, I'll turn notifications off unless I'm specifically tagged, or maybe check in once a week if it's for a specific purpose, but otherwise I hate them. Signal for some things that aren't time sensitive, no notifications, no read receipts on any platform.
Cost you or saved you from... ?
> They will perceive your lack of response as you not prioritising them.
And correctly so: you are prioritizing people that contact you in the normal way (via phone calls).
If I send you a text message, it's usually because I don't need an immediate reply; answering me tomorrow is good enough. If I do need a faster reply (if I'm texting an image or some such, or in a noisy place), I'll make a call afterwards, just long enough to set off your ringer so you hear it.
I also deal with notifications in a different manner: I have different ringtones and extensive notification filters set up. Most of my apps will not make any noise with a notification while the screen is off. Most notifications will not show up on the lockscreen. Most notifications will not show up in the status bar. My standard ringtone is an mp3 with a short quiet ring and a long pause before it ends, so while I do get call notifications they're easy to ignore; only important contacts (family) are allowed to bubble or pop on top, and they also get a different ringtone.
I dread migrating my phone, as none of this can be backed up. I changed phones last year and still find the occasional app that I forgot to blacklist notifications for and never noticed because things related to https://dontkillmyapp.com simply prevents it from running altogether when I haven't used it in the past couple days.
One aspect of no phone is how to deal with payments. Specifically UPI payments in India. These are QR code based payments and it is getting more difficult to pay by cash at many locations.
Right next to that is OTPs from financial institutions.
On the way towards the same issue in Vietnam. You can still pay with cash everywhere but it's becoming more and more normal to use QR codes. I guess in the next year or two I'll start to see places that only take QR. It's very convenient... unless you don't have a local bank account, or your phone runs out of battery, or, as happened to me 30 minutes ago, your bank's system goes down.
That would be a great idea if I were on vacation in a cabin in the woods. But realistically, I need my phone for just about everything I do on a daily basis, from payments, to navigation, to communicating with friends and family, and logging into accounts for work.
At least a few of these, like payments and basic communications, can be done from a watch.
Work accounts, camera, and maps are the big blockers for me. I know I can buy a camera but 90% of the times when I take a photo it's to instantly send it via a messaging app, mostly for work.
> At least a few of these, like payments and basic communications, can be done from a watch.
Is that a distinction without a difference?
There’s an even more straightforward exercise.
Step 1: delete your social media
There is no step 2.
There are plenty of non-social-media time-wasters. Reddit, YouTube, and the site you're on right now are just some examples.
Those are social media too
I do use Reddit and YouTube to follow topics related to work. And to some degree Hacker News as well. Come to think of it, these are the apps that make up for most of the screen time usage for me.
I'm curious, have you tried this? Would love to learn what you jotted down.
Letting the battery die completely on an Apple device is a good recipe for an expensive repair. Just turn it off.
Really? How much damage (in terms of effect on battery capacity) does it do if you let the battery die once? Or once every few months?
I bet most people would be surprised by how little they actually need their phones once they break the autopilot
Way too much friction. I don't have the luxury of going "off the map" for a week.
I think a middle ground version of this is possible, e.g. instead of letting your battery die, reset the phone to defaults and don’t install anything with the exception of critical communication apps.
Run the rest of the experiment as described for other categories of use.
Why not?
Some people have jobs that require phone contact.
Some people have family juggling/concerns that requires frequent contact (usually involving children being remote places).
There are many, many, not so strange reasons that someone might need to maintain contact. Thinking it's not possible suggests a very naive perspective.
just turning it off and putting it not in the pocket is enough to create a distance. Two minutes help to cool down.
This is how I cured my social media addiction.
I turned my iPhone into pure utility device by uninstalling all the entertainment apps. I only allow music and podcasts as those don’t require my active attention.
Then I have an iPad mini at home which has all the entertainment and social media stuff installed. However I don’t have many opportunities to use that device during the day..
After maybe a week of having this arrangement I found myself being less and less interested in grabbing that iPad. It’s been few months now and I only check my socials maybe twice a week.
Also since I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Threads, YouTube and TikTok from my phone the battery life almost doubled. It was eye opening to see how much these apps drain battery even when the device is left untouched.
Also great video regarding this topic: "You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8
I now regularly force myself to "actively" do nothing for 15 minutes and just think.
All the things I put into my brain as "todo, please remember" at some point in time are coming back during these 15 minutes.
I get quite a lot of clarity with this exercise. As soon I pick up my phone afterwards and start browsing the clarity evaporates which feels bad. So wasting time on my phone becomes less and less appealing to me.
Lets see where this leads me. I so far wasted quite a bit of time with my phone.
Damn this really rings true to me, and makes me deeply wish I had my own office again. There are advantages to a cubicle environment but the noise means headphones which means distraction.
I never found a reason to buy a tablet but it seems that you have given a very good one. Moving all the distractions to another device that I can't carry around with me is a great idea and I'm going to try it! Thanks Miika!
This is what i do with the tablet i have. Its an Android tablet, but de-googled with a spoof account. That way i can play games / apps and not have any account tried to it.
>I only allow music and podcasts as those don't require my active attention.
podcasts? How do you listen and benefit without paying active attention?
I can easily listen to podcasts while doing household chores. Most podcasts aren't that information-dense anyways and while retention isn't perfect, you get an overview of a topic and can still dig deeper (or not) later. Or to flip it around: most podcasts don't give you that much benefit anyways.
I think the answer is actually the other way around: It's the chores that don't require much attention.
YMMV but I sometimes listen to a podcast or audiobook while playing mindless video games. I can't watch a show while playing video games, since I need to actually watch the screen. Since the game doesn't require mental thought, I can still pay attention to the content of the podcast.
+1 to this.
Personally, I listen to podcasts while biking or driving; I can't just sit and listen to them, I need to be physically doing something.
This is exactly what has worked for me as well. Before this, the iPad was rotting in a corner for years, because the phone was just always available and I had consumed everything on the phone already, obliterating the need for the iPad.
I deleted all social media as well, but I did keep YouTube (NewPipe, that is) with a curated list of subscriptions and no auto-suggestions/trending/shorts. I find many interesting things there.
> I only allow music and podcasts as those don’t require my active attention.
I just bought a cheap MP3 player and it has significantly reduced my smartphone usage to the point that sometimes I forgot where left it.
https://gpodder.github.io is a great app to subscribe to podcasts, download them as mp3s, and syncing them to a offline player.
I haven't had any of those apps installed for years. It's using the web versions in my browser that kills.me, because I can't get by without a browser.
Sorry basic question.
You can still access all the social media from the browser eh?
Yes but social media companies have helpfully made this experience unpleasant.
deliberately so, so as to force you to install their app that can get deeper into your device than any cookie ever could
Stay logged off in the browser, don't carry (unique, complex) password around if you have to.
But this is desperate level of proper addiction, when serious hard look at one's life is by far the best course of action. Professional help is not a bad idea neither. Life can be pretty amazing, but screens won't get you there, in contrary its cheap basic addictive 'fun' for poor.
Many years ago I removed all FB apps and messenger from my phone (due to their crappy engineering their constant snooping of user's activity was, draining batteries fast even when not using them). Have them on desktop only. Pretty amazing move, can't recommend enough.
There is something magical in 2025 to practically disconnect from all the social noise. But one can't be total piece of s*it who can't stand themselves of course.
I am experimenting with using freedom.to to block social media in the browser. It creates a VPN profile that blocks these sites in the browser (it also uses the Screen Time API to block specific apps). The downsides are that you can just go into iOS settings to disable the profile, and I am paying Freedom a subscription for something I could set up for free. The upside vs. managing it myself is that it's much easier to create a schedule (eg block during weekdays, instead of block 24/7).
This is my weakness. I really miss leechblock since changing to iPhone
I use Burnout Buddy, it can block both apps and websites, you can set up custom rules, time based, usage based or triggered by Shortcuts (for instance I have one set up to block Reddit when I enter the gym).
Just want to say I was looking for something like this the other day that didn’t feature an obscene subscription and I’m very glad you made me aware of this app. It’s lovely and free!
Woah this is nice! And pretty generous free app
You can block them on dns level. That's what I did when I wanted to stop wasting time playing 2048. (Not sure how to configure DNS on phone, I was using PC to play at the time)
This has helped me too.
I have NextDNS profiles on my phone and PC that block problematic sites, as well as the settings dashboard itself to stop me touching it unless I'm on my tablet.
+1 for NextDNS. Last week I experimented with building a Brick[0]-like solution from my Android phone, by using an old badge I had lying around acting as an NFC trigger to launch a Tasker automation that enables/disables filtering profiles in NextDNS via REST API. It's working nicely, although it takes a while to effectively enable/disable filtering, I assume because of DNS caching on the phone. Also sometimes I actually need YouTube/Reddit/Instagram/etc. to look up something, so for now I settled on the slightly less nuclear option of using ScreenZen[1] to make my app opening a tad bit more mindful. I sometimes found myself going around the restricted app opening count/time limits by using my iPad, but overall my mindless screen time is decreasing, so I don't stress it too much. I don't have any issues with notifications really as I usually set them up to only receive what I deem important from the get go when I install a new app, and I also have Do Not Disturb and Routines enabled most of the time, plus a smartwatch to take a quick glimpse at messages if needed.
[0] https://getbrick.app/ [1] https://www.screenzen.co/
On the iPhone you can use Screen Time to block social media apps, and it will also block their websites.
However since you're the account owner (rather than a child), you can always just bypass the Screen Time block... But at least it adds a barrier.
My workaround for this is to always log in from porn/incognito mode where it doesn't remember cookies. Each time I have to type password and go through 2FA.
iPhones have a website blocking feature built in. It's possible to set up separate time limits for different websites. Setting a limit to 0 effectively block the site. Ask family member or a friend to set the pin for you and you're set.
Basically using environment design to beat habit loops
Interesting! I wish Apple would expand on "Assistive Access" mode. - https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
They made this for people with cognitive disabilities, but it also works great for older people. It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours. I realize I'm describing something actually doable in the interface now with focus modes and just holding myself accountable by deleting apps like Tiktok, but I do like the idea of having a way to enforce it.
> It just wouldn't work for me. I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example. But I don't want them during non-work hours.
Not an iPhone, but my solution to this is LineageOS + microG, where I just disable push notifications when I'm not working, or enable them for just the few select apps if I am expecting some messages there. The price for this is that I don't always receive the social app message when it is sent, but that's fine by me.
That’s exactly what he meant by using Focus Modes, which is the iOS feature that lets you do just that.
Plain Android has work profiles that will allow the user to enable/disable a "work profile" at will. This is what I use because we have on-call duties and on most weeks I don't need to be available on my work accounts.
I use an old iPhone for work stuff.
Using a spare phone is super underrated, I keep mine in the drawer when I need it, and it goes back in there right after when i'm done.
> I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example.
So do I, but I certainly don't need them on my phone. For the longest time the only work app I had on my phone was some 2FA thing. Then asked them to either buy me a phone or a yubikey. I got a yubikey (and my phone complete free from anything work related).
To quote someone else in this thread: People live different lives.
I tried this for a bunch of work apps that require 2FA. They pushed back hard enough where I was threatened with getting written up. I relented and installed MS Authenticator on my personal phone.
I'm still bitter about the intrusion of work stuff on my personal phone.
I absolutely hate Microsoft authenticator. Why does it need its own app? Google Authenticator, Auth Apple Passwords, freaking Aegis, everything works with TOTP and piece of shit Microsoft has to go off and do its own thing like that nonsense Duo.
You can actually use an alternative authenticator app for Microsoft logins. I use Aegis on my phone for it.
They don't make it clear in the messaging during the sign-up flow, which just says Microsoft Authenticator everywhere. But when you proceed through the steps to get a TOTP code for Microsoft Authenticator, there's a step with a link to something like "I want to use an another authenticor app", which presents a QR code for any generic TOTP app.
I've done this as well. My employers setup guide was super long winded and tried hard to suggest MS Authenticator was the only one that would work without outright saying it.
However, I've gathered that this is a setting that is up to the organization so your YMMV. Since some employees work at secure sites without wifi/mobile connections they aren't able to turn off TOTP.
Have you considered https://authenticator.cc/ ?
I realize it is amusing to even consider offloading OTP generation to a web browser extension however, if `$work` doesn’t want to provide you with the correct hardware (e.g. Yubikey, NitroKey, etc.) there are boundary-respecting alternatives
No one tells you because they want you to use their app but most can be replaced by floss apps running on your laptop.
I don’t know if this would work for you, but I’m personally using 1Password on my laptop to generate 2FA codes. It worked even on Microsoft services, after clicking through lots of alternative settings, although some employers might disable that if they insist on push 2FA not just TOTP.
If this happens to me I'm buying the cheapest android I can find and just attaching it to my work laptop with adhesive.
> I need Jira, Slack, and GitHub during work hours for example.
My question, why do you need them on your phone during work hours? Why aren't you using a desktop/laptop/something else?
If your work-style is butt-in-seat for 8 hours having everything on your laptop probably works. For folks with a more meeting-heavy workload, having at least your work calendar/email/messenger on your phone is pretty hard to go without
Why are you on your phone during meetings and not paying attention to the meeting? We ban phones/laptops for the specific reason of people attending and not paying attention.
As of iOS 18 you can add any app you want into assistive access now! It has been going pretty well with Beeper on my end.
I tried Assistive Access and I don’t think I even made it a day.
Most of these attempts to simplify things are putting idealism at odds with reality.
I like Assistive Access, but my biggest issue is that you have to click like 100 times to read any notification. No option to just be able to read a text from the home screen. I found it was even more friction (for my use) to unlock my phone constantly than the regular format.
This. The I feel the significant nerfing of important functionality in the Camera app (as an example) suggests assistive access isn't geared toward the general folk like myself.
> people with cognitive disabilities
Does… does my phone addiction and inability for self-control qualify as this?
Huge, thanks, somehow missed it. Smart TV UIs are begging for this mode too, for users to whom aesthetic is irrelevant.
> Consider email. I still need to have access to email, and I want to have notifications enabled so I don’t miss something truly important. But 90% of the emails I get aren’t important.
I was at a talk at FOSDEM this year and they were talking about how most emails now (over 90%) are transactional in nature and not personal. Things like password resets, offers, 2fa, shipping confirmations.
This was a lightbulb moment for me - for years I'd been trying to fight email by using sieve to filter away the most annoying senders and subjects but they're right - almost all email doesn't deserve your immediate attention.
I switched my method to whitelist. I created a folder called Transactional and everything goes in there. Then I started whitelisting certain email addresses to let them get to my inbox. I have around 20, and for the first time in years I'm at a point where I could have notifications for my inbox. I still don't, but they'd be useful now
Agreed. Many years ago I set up a personal email address for that very reason, i.e. one through which I only expect personal 1-to-1 correspondence, and which I only hand out to family & friends, never to companies (which easily get hacked and/or one day decide to reuse your email address for their newsletter).
I have one of those personal correspondence email addresses, but someone got "hacked" and their address list was scraped, and now I get spam to that address.
Gmail has ben doing this for years, automatically. And it works very well. I think a lot of people don't know the feature exists, though
Gmail's magic algorithms are notoriously unreliable. When they work they work, but when they don't, they really don't. And you won't know, because them not working means you won't get any kind of notification they don't work.
I've gotten direct responses sent to my spam. I've gotten emails, WITH ATTACHMENTS, sent to my spam from a known email address. Its a good thing I check my spam. Many (most?) don't.
Seems like most people have just decided that email is for receipts, bills, and spam. And real messages are sent over IM apps where there are no automated messages and everything is worth reading.
Except gmail pretty unexplicably filtered away stuff like a direct response from my boss, to an email I specifically sent to him half an hour ago. After a couple of these hiccups, plus hours spent trying to locate emails that I knew existed and even knew the right keywords for, I just disabled any and all of their filtering (which is, unsurprisingly, not just a checkbox...) and access gmail exclusively through Thunderbird.
It's inexplicable to me how google, of all companies, can be so consistently shit at search across all their products.
Although it really does, the algorithm is outside your control and scrutiny. An artisanal white list is totally under your control, and fully portable. Break the shackles.
This is the main feature I miss from leaving Gmail. 99.9% of email is complete junk not worth ever opening, let alone getting a notification about.
This is probably where I can see the most value from LLMs, the ability to filter all of my emails by urgency without distracting me with notifications from newsletter spam.
This is exactly why I pay for hey.com email. Every new address is screened in and I can turn on notifications for specific addresses or domains. I have notifications on just a tiny handful of addresses and it's perfect for me.
I've gone from ignoring my email for weeks at a time and fighting with spam to quickly checking my email every day now.
If google weren’t such an ass about your data you could download everything and run some queries to see how you should create your rules
What is sending you the most emails? What emails did you actually care about?
Yes yes, you can do this technically speaking, but good luck actually trying - everything is so slow and old emails with attachments will simply not download - they won’t load even in the UI sometimes
For me, I did what you did except with a new email address
That address has notifications and they are reserved pretty much for just people - I don’t use it for websites at all - I only give to people whose email id like to see right away
I have every gmail email I have ever gotten plus attachments downloaded to my Thunderbird client, it is incorrect to say that Google does not let you access that data. They let you do a full sync and use whatever client you want.
I never said they don’t allow it, they even have something called google takeout actually that makes it a bit easier
Yes, one way of doing this is to turn on an email client and let it run on your computer for hours and hours to download everything
The problem is that unless you’ve done that incrementally since the beginning, going back and doing it now is unreliable. The take process above is your best bet and probably the best you can actually do, but outside of that there’s nothing that works well
I’ve even written gscripts with different approaches to do it and it always ends up petering out no matter how careful I am
Also, I think some attachments are permanently corrupted because my apps, whatever the app, always hangs when I try to download them
Anyway, this could be made a lot easier if they actually wanted to let people do that
If anything, it’d be great if they had a tool to do it to begin with - I’ve had my account for over 20 years now so just downloading everything is no small feat
I set up new computers somewhat frequently and have never had any issues downloading the entire 20 year old email-never-deleted mailbox from the server, including attachments.
I will also point out that free email is not something that should be expected to be a scalable storage service.
That’s interesting, maybe I’m doing something wrong
That said, the times I’ve encountered this, when the import doesn’t actually fail and appears successful, I still can’t access the specific attachment I’m looking for
It could be an old picture that is probably gone for good but forever shows loading… in the ui
Interesting idea to use Apple Configurator, I like it! I use a combination of uninstalling any interesting apps + Foqos + One Sec + grayscale.
This works pretty well for me, and the key part is Foqos, which is FOSS that allows you to disable certain apps or features with the scan of a QR code or NFC tag. I keep the QR code / NFC tag in a separate building or locked box, so there's real friction if I want to scan it to use the phone beyond basic functionality.
Like the OP, I also have the issue of "semi-important" things, which is mostly email but occasionally some browser thing (often buying or viewing event tickets.) My plan for that is to use Foqos in combination with a QR code + scratch-off sticker, a sort of "break glass in emergency" option that adds some friction but not too much. Print a sheet of identical QR codes, scan it into Foqos as your unlock option, put stickers over them, cut them out and put them in your phone case.
Wow I'm the creator of Foqos, thanks for the shoutout <3
greyscale is a game changer. i wasn’t a believer until i forced myself to use it, but it really turns off the appeal. have you ever seen someone just staring at their phone and flipping through the home screen(s)?
The active readers counter is a trip. I’ve read and viewed graphs depicting how much traffic HN can bring to a web page, but to see it in real time is something else.
Author here: It's powered by Instant, the company I helped found.
The counter is pretty easy to set up.
Here's how it works on the blog:
1. You set up a schema:
https://github.com/stopachka/stopaio/blob/main/src/instant.s...
2. And then use `presence` to write an ActiveCounter:
https://github.com/stopachka/stopaio/blob/main/src/app/Activ...
Your product placement link to instantdb totally worked btw (as in the one in your allowed websites not this one here)
Heck yeah : ).
TBH, it's kind of hard to square "I locked down my phone to have less distractions in my life" with "I put a counter on my page that changes 10 times a second while you're trying to read"
I didn't even notice that there was a counter before I opened the HN comments.
Fair point! I guess I count that as a "positive" distraction. It isn't every day that the active number there is so 'active'.
As you read the post it should disappear with the scroll.
My charitable suspicion is that this blog post is all some sort of esoteric way for you to show off your nifty technology. If it wasn’t for your robust catalog of previous writing I’d be more confident in this.
But whatever the case is, you hit on something right here!
Thank you for the kind words about the nifty technology and the essay : )
You know you touch on something interesting. I feel like the best 'marketing' or 'networking' happens over decades. Of course this implies that best 'marketing' and 'networking' are often done for a different goal entirely.
I noticed this in my career. I've always been interested in programming and writing, and it would bring me to ask people random questions over email. I'd find myself connecting with the same person 10 years later, and we'd help each other out in some way.
My wife and I put parental controls on each others' phones. I turn them off for travel (in case I need something unexpected) and then back on when I get home. It sounds crazy but it works great.
Having an accountabilibuddy definitely helps establish and maintain compliance.
We do the same and it works well, and its a fun time for us when the other person asks for more time for an app, mostly instagram.
I do the same accept I created the parent account that is stored on my computer.
The friction of having to go to my computer to grant access to my apps on the phone is enough to keep my off social media.
In the fight against "Weapons of Mass Distraction" I went to a Qin F21 Pro and used ADB to remove everything distracting.
This might be a way back to the iPhone for me though.
I strongly identify with the author's feeling that their phone had a kind of "gravity" before removing these apps. I described mine to somebody as the sense I was carrying around the ring of power in my pocket. It felt heavy.
If you are in a room full of people and you close your eyes, you still feel the presence of those people and your self-consciousness is thus mobilized. There is something similar going on when I have a phone full of apps. Even when it's off, I can still sense their presence and some part of me is still online, idling and using resources to account for that.
> So far the only real unsolved issue I have are related to “semi-important” apps. Consider email. I still need to have access to email, and I want to have notifications enabled so I don’t miss something truly important. But 90% of the emails I get aren’t important.
> I am not sure what the solution is to these kind of apps. Maybe I can find a special mail app, that only shows you important emails. If I had something like this I think I would just be over the moon with this setup.
I have always had email notifications turned off and I was always missing important emails, especially from people I cared about. I finally figured out the solution. In Gmail (only tested on Android, can't speak for iPhone) I created a label called "notify". I then created filters for specific emails and words that apply the label. You can turn on notifications in Gmail (for Android at least) for specific labels. That's it! Maybe someone else can confirm that this can be done on the iPhone Gmail app? or something similar
I unsubscribed from most of mailing lists/sites/social media. I barely get any email.
When I get email, it’s highly likely, that’s important.
Or filter your emails to the word “unsubscribe” and get them in /newsletters.
What for? If you never look at it again, why even receive it?
For me it’s mostly spam/garbage I don’t intend to swift through or even look at.
I just look at it when I want. On my desktop ideally.
I have some issues with this guide. I find it very odd how the very first step of the guide is to “erase all content and settings” but it doesn’t really mention all the caveats around this. There really should be warnings or a separate guide about doing this safely because if some people do that, they could lock themselves out of MFA-protected accounts.
Lastly, about Apple Configurator, it seems like it only works on macOS, so probably this won’t work if you have an iPhone but no macOS device, right?
We are close to the “we should put a warning label on the microwave that don’t dry your cat in it”. At some point it’s not a blog authors responsibility to make you understand that “erase all content” erases all content.
Well I sort of feel that many years ago before MFA was suggested or required for many different sites, it was less risky for a typical person to erase all content.
I took an easier path. I carry two phones - a smartphone and a dumb phone. The smartphone is usually turned off, and is only charged once every 3-4 days. It holds its charge. The dumbphone is actually a second-hand Sony Ericsson Walkman phone which I really love. It has basic web browsing, some very basic utility apps and excellent sound quality, which I care a lot about and bluetooth too. This physical, non-software based friction is what helped me cure my addiction. If someone wants to contact me urgently - they drop a regular SMS or simply just call me. This also helped me separate my personal life and work life really well where clients can reach me on WhatsApp or elsewhere only when I'm on my laptop. Other times, if it's an emergency, they can always just call me.
I don't use Facebook or other social media on my laptop anyway, so it's nice to have when I need to access something (like marketplace). But other than that, the peace of mind is truly worth the hassle of carrying two phones.
Really like how you've drawn clear lines between personal and work life
Thanks! It was the only way I was able to convince clients too.
Do you use an iPhone? If so, how are you making it work with iMessage? Do you just disable it completely?
I just use regular text messages :) So, the dumbphone just gets them.
I had a two phone lifestyle as well for different reasons: I needed car play but don't like iOS, and also needed to know Android and iOS quite well for my job.
One iPhone that was wifi only, had my entire music library local, used for car play and a few exclusive apps.
One android with a sim that had my communication apps, social media, and some custom tinkering stuff that doesn't exist on iOS.
I did this for about two years. The main takeaways: -I 100% could have just had the iPhone with a sim for communication apps and been fine. The social media was just annoying enough to swap to that I never felt that draw and barely used it on 2phones. -even though I despise how little customization iOS lets you do, without social media or game apps, the only actual pain point with it was the nightmare of managing notifications/alert/vibration/screen wake settings* -god it made me miss small phones so much. The android was a pixel 4a, the last real phone with real hardware that released at the actual ideal size for my hands(that has an unlocked bootloader, I really can't do the Samsung hellOS experience again).
Now Im on a pixel 8 only, with Glider for this site and no other social media or games. It's fine. Phones too big, car doesn't have AAuto, and Google is trying to rot the foundation of android, but for now it's fine and better than the two phone experience because it's less juggling.
I really like this setup. I think it balances friction and usefulness in exactly the way I've been aiming for.
Still, I have a couple questions about it, since I don't own an iPhone but am considering buying one soon.
1. How does this affect backup and restore? Could I still restore from a backup on a new phone, if needed? I've lost my phone while traveling before and buying a replacement was pretty seamless.
2. Is the ability to disable the profile bound to the Mac you use Apple Configurator on? I don't own a Mac, but if I could use a friend's Mac when I need to make changes this could maybe work.
Great writeup, thanks for posting it!
I've been using the same setup as the author for about a year, I can help some.
1. I don't know, never tried this. I do know iCloud backups still work, because I've used them after wiping my phone. But I think you must plug the new phone into your computer and set it up as a managed device before you load the backup, or else parts of the profile might not take.
2. No, it's not. I traded in my old macbook pro for a mac mini back in May. I was able to use Apple Configurator on the new mac mini to change the profile on my phone. There is one caveat though -- the phone is still technically supervised by the old mac, so you have to confirm the profile by going into the phone's settings. Using the original, you just have to plug the phone in and unlock it.
Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.
Both of your answers sound workable for me!
Even if I couldn't restore the whole profile from backup while traveling (which seems natural), at least it's still possible to restore some data. Which should be enough in the short term.
And that's perfect that I could manage it from a different Mac. That totally works for me. I worried there would be something which prevented that. I'm imagining a parent using this for parental controls, but then the kid disabling it at a friend's house who has a Mac. Works better for my scenario though!
When you set up the phone as Supervised, there's a box you can un-check to disable using a different Mac. So just make sure you don't un-check it :)
Thanks! Great idea to use configurator. Turning my iPhone into a dumb phone has been one of the best things I ever did. My relationship with my phone was weird (using it for distraction from anxiety, zoning out on it etc) and all this has gotten way better, I’m finding I can focus again. (I’ve set something similar up using an ad blocker app, but it was a bit of a hack.)
I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.
Wow thanks for the shout, I'm the maker of Dumb Phone! Always super nice hearing how much that set up has helped improve their relationship with their phone / tech in general and be more present every day. Thank you!
> Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list
I had no idea this was even possible to customize! Thank you.
thanks heaps! more info here: https://dumbphone.so/
It silently surveils you and uploads your usage data to the developer (and Google).
The configurator is interesting and something I haven't heard of before!
It's a double edged sword because the amount of time I spend online (X) has been directly responsible for the most valuable opportunities and generally knowing enough of what's going on to leverage that for big financial and career returns. It was pretty easy to drop all non-X social media though (all meta) and just avoid short term video generally.
I've been tempted to try the lightphone 3 though - theory being if I have a separate hardware device that might be enough to help because I can leave the iPhone at home. In theory the Apple Watch could do this, but in practice it hasn't.
Another thing I think can work is committing to avoid using it for one day a week - you get a lot of the benefits, it's more doable, and the downside is minimized.
Literally got my current job through a mufo on X, so I feel obliged to stick to it for the same reasons. That being said, I’ve curtailed a lot of my time on it and other social media. The results have been positive.
I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled. There is almost no email I get that needs instant action. The one exception is delivery notifications, so I can retrieve the package immediately, and I used a filter to get notifications just for those.
Pro-tip: On iPhone, iPad, and macOS, you can shut off email notifications for everything except VIPs.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/28/add-senders-vip-mai...
Yeah, this is the way. And then be super parsimonious about who gets to be a VIP.
Email from my boss, my wife, my sister, my mother, and like 2 best friends produces a notification. Nothing else.
And if any of those folks were too chatty, I'd make a different choice.
People live different lives
> There is almost no email I get that needs instant action.
Different people get different e-mails.
Also, some people just don't check e-mail otherwise. Why would they? Notifications tell them the 5 times a day they get a new e-mail, so they don't need to manually check their e-mail 2-3 times a day. It actually makes a lot of sense. Notifications mean you never have to check your e-mail.
I’m a little confused by these comments about not checking stuff unless you get a notification.
Do you get notified of every article on HN that you read? Or what about YouTube or other content that you consume?
I’ve had email notifications turned off for years, and have no problem checking my email once or twice a day, just to see if there’s anything worth reading. (Spoiler alert: there almost never is.)
Just like HN, and a couple forums that I visit. I’ll check occasionally to see what’s going on.
For all of these things, it’s never anything urgent or time sensitive. Even if I went a couple days without checking, it’d be fine.
If somebody needs to reach me for anything time sensitive (outside of work), there’s SMS (with notifications) or phone (of course, notifications).
I think much of the issue with these comments — and this whole thread, in general — boils down to:
1. People use things outside of SMS and phone for time sensitive things (solution: move time sensitive things to SMS/phone)
2. People overestimate the criticality/time sensitivity of these things sending notifications
I’d rather check my email (or other X app) once or twice a day, if that, and catch up on low priority things, rather than get interrupted 5-10 times a day for these low priority things.
> I’d rather check my email (or other X app) once or twice a day, if that, and catch up on low priority things, rather than get interrupted 5-10 times a day for these low priority things.
Nobody's saying you're wrong. That's great.
I'm just saying there are also people who are the opposite, and their way of doing it is also valid and works great for them.
Also, stuff on HN and YouTube isn't for you personally, and it doesn't need your reply, so it's not really an analogy for personal messages.
> I'm just saying there are also people who are the opposite, and their way of doing it is also valid and works great for them.
Agreed, but if we’re here discussing ways to reduce distractions of smartphones, I think auditing our notifications and the usage of apps that send notifications, particularly of things that are more noise than signal, is worth mentioning.
> Also, stuff on HN and YouTube isn't for you personally, and it doesn't need your reply, so it's not really an analogy for personal messages.
Fair point, but I’d bet that 90% of most people’s email is also not personal messages, and just more noise.
Yes, we should unsubscribe from the noise, and I have, but I still have some things I get that I occasionally care about, just not enough to be notified.
>I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled. There is almost no email I get that needs instant action.
People are different and have different use cases and needs.
i don't have them enabled; but, the email address I use for my Android phone and tables is used only for those devices.I've neer used my primary email address on a mobile device. Email can wait until I'm at a computer.
I turn it on during job search. Like right now.
I often considered turning my gmail notifs off just so I wouldn't excitedly pick up my phone to get hit with the "Unfortunately..." ruining my mood
that makes sense. I should prbly do that too.
Email and chat apps are just about the only notifications I keep. I "archive" any unwanted email right from the notification screen, I report as spam anything I don't like. I hate people who have 4 digits in their email bubbles.
I really wish Apple/Google would do something about notifications, use AI for something useful.
"Hey you haven't read any of your 3454 emails, should I disable notifications for Gmail?"
"Hey you're drowning in notifications with your son texting you 2 hours ago, 4 pages down. Should I prioritize him maybe?"
Four digits? Rookies.
Hey i kept my unread count on gmail at 666 for weeks!
Email bubbles? Rookies.
(you know you can make those bubbles go away?!)
> I really wish Apple/Google would do something about notifications, use AI for something useful.
Yes, please, for the love of anything that is holy. Stop the SMS spam!
If I don't get a notification for something, there's a good chance I'll forget to check emails/texts/etc for weeks at a time.
WAT.
...do you check for texts if you don't have any text notifications telling you to?
I certainly don't.
Yes, if I know I don't have notifications for them!
I have email notifications disabled. I check my email in the morning.
I don't get a notification every time I receive a letter. I check my mailbox every other day.
Something like before launcher with filtered notifications gives you a list you can go through whenever. But they don't clear (your uber is getting close) and even then I often forget to check sms for 2 days
Texts? Generally no.
Mail? Absolutely. Because most mail doesn't produce a notification.
> Because most mail doesn't produce a notification.
It does if you turn them on.
Thanks for clearing that up!
> I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled.
For me email on the phone uses less than 1% of my screen time during the day.
You can probably just use the UPS/FedEx/Amazon apps to get those notifications instead anyway.
suggestion to install apps in a detox thread
I don’t think that delivery service apps make you hooked on your phone. It’s high value information (assuming you care when exactly your stuff arrives) that you get quickly without distractions. IMO it’s less distracting than email apps (again, assuming you care about your emails).
I would never install one of these apps (more for security/privacy than information detox) but if Uber can abuse the notification system for advertising then it wouldn't surprise me if these companies would too.
Interesting, because my Uber has notifications disabled but my delivery apps have them on.
When I'm waiting for Uber to arrive I know it will come, because I just ordered it, so I just check my phone.
Maybe I'm lucky with my delivery apps because mine don't send ads.
Email and messages is the very few notifications I enabled on my phone. Reason is simple: I get very few of them, and most of them are either important, or if not, I appreciate knowing about it more than not knowing about it.
You can set email notifications (or any app) to deliver quietly. I made this change years ago for email and some social apps. You can go through the notifications when you check your phone but aren't distracted with it vibrating on every email.
I leave my email notifications on because I don't get that much email, and most email I get is something I want to read.
I don't read my work email at all unless I am specifically looking for something.
The default setting is always king
Uhm. I set the email app to check for mail every 30 minutes. But also I don't get that many messages (and mailinglists and whatnot are filtered away to subfolders that don't trigger the notification) so when I get the notification is for something I actually need.
Apart from that I only have notifications for IM (telegram/whatsapp) and the phone is in constant DND mode (with sound allowed only for calls).
"Dear Sir stroke Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out at the premises of..." no, that's too formal
You can achieve the same more easily using Screen Time, and having a trusted friend or partner enter the screen time passcode. Still possible to override with your Apple ID, but this is a significant enough speed bump that it works (for me anyway).
I do this too, and have them set the recover apple id to their own. Been averaging ~1.2 hours per day screentime the last few months (mostly messaging apps).
Basically in "downtime" mode all the time with a few "Always allowed" app. One thing is, you're phone (and it's browser) is pretty damn useless. Overtime you realize that a lot of things you need to lookup don't need to be looked up, etc but it can be frustrating at first.
That's how my children's iPads are too. Permanent downtime, with a few always allowed apps, and the rest on demand. And indeed, the most frustrating part is when my daughter needs to do some research for school. I'd have to allow each and every website she visits, so I temporarily un-downtime her phone instead...
Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click). That's why I had to opt for permanent downtime.
> That's how my children's iPads are too
Hah! Says something about my self control!
Yeah it's usually trouble once a week. I recently needed to pay for parking using a QR code had to finish it in the 1 minute I had. Another appointment asked me to fill some online form and their reaction when I said "my phone is blocked from the internet" was funny. Turns out they still have paper forms when needed.
> time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click).
Huh, that's weird. Seems to work ok for mine in limiting their iPad use. They can request more time and I can decide to grant it or not, I get choices of 15 minutes, 1 hour or all day.
I agree it's odd, and I've tried to fix this problem for a long time before giving up...
While we're at it, I wish there was a 30 minutes option! There are many situations where 15 minutes is too short, and 1 hour is too long.
Agreed. Another issue I have is that the requests will randomly stop propagating from the kids' iPads to my phone. To fix it, I have to either reboot the phone or if that doesn't work, change the name of my phone.
You can block a lot of sites directly in router setup. It is password protected and almost impossible to override or hack.
In case your kids hack the router you know that they have Kevin Mitnick skills :)
pretty sure if you un-downtime a non-safari browser it applies to all websites.
I've spoken to quite a few people that do this which was very interesting, especially how a hard lock has helped them hard reset and start building healthier phone habits
the only thing missing from this setup is the ability to unlock remotely (as I can with my kids' devices). for some reason apple won't let an adult (fully) manage the screen time of another adult.
my wife has the password for my screentime, but i can't send her a request if we're physically apart. which means i'm out of luck, or she has to share the actual code with me, which then requires her to change it (and remember the new one)
The author says screen time limits are too easy to ignore. That is in a sense true. I "solved" that problem though by using a password to unlock the app. I however don't know that password, only my wife does. So whenever i need to use the browser, facebook or something i ask her to unlock it for me, often for like 15 minutes.
A more lightweight option, though easier to bypass, is to disable apps, App Store, even Safari, with "Content & Privacy Restrictions".
See Settings – Screen Time.
You can use a passcode to lock it. It seems primarily meant for blocking things from your kids.
But it can help turn your iPhone more into a dumb phone
(Blocking safari was the key, for me)
He mentions this, says it’s too easy to circumvent.
it's not though. See the thread above about having someone else enter the screen time code
I never really quite got the motivation for this: The much more apparent issue is surely the lack of self-control, right? Which we all do at times.
I'd rather feel confident I'm improving along that metric than to build guardrails for myself everywhere ...
I don't think self control works that way. Every decision you make causes decision fatigue, which means that the things that you encounter constantly that nag at you and take your attention have a serious impact on your day-to-day. Like, say you have the energy to make 1000 decisions throughout the day. That includes dressing well, remembering to do things, eating well, making time for side projects, etc. Say your phone provides 100 times when you have to say 'no, I'm going to make the more difficult decision and not give in to this' each day. Well, that adds up.
I have type 1 diabetes, and there's studies about this on diabetics actually. There's a huge hit to quality of life and specific kinds of burnout attributed to the thousand or so extra decisions we have to make every day to manage our blood sugar. I'd love to get rid of those, but since I can't, I'm particularly sensitive to bullshit that takes my attention or willpower like that. In my experience, people don't live on a spectrum where "I have self control" = Everything that happens to me I make the right decision even if its hard or "I have no self control" = I always make the bad decision. There's always a pool of decisions, and the further you get into the onslaught of decisions the more you're beaten down and the worse your self-control is.
It is perhaps possible to attain a monk-like state where your will is absolute and you never make any compromises (although I doubt it), but since 99.99% of us will never get there, I think there's a lot to be said for cutting out things that nudge us in the wrong direction constantly
In an ideal world, sure, but there can be times where it's better to just lock yourself out.
Maybe breaking out of your phone is just more self-control than you currently possess. Imagine trying to get in shape but you're only allowed to lift 200+ pound weights - you simply aren't strong enough to even make progress, you need an easier task.
Or maybe you just have other priorities in the short-term. I'd love to get to the point where I can easily ignore my phone, but right now my priority is to finish unpacking after a move and getting back into the rhythm of going to the gym. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits: To break out of a bad habit, make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. Locking a phone down to barebones functionality does all three.
Finally, maybe you have a deficit of attention. I've had diagnosed ADHD since I was a child - my level of self control for addicting systems is significantly diminished compared to a "normal" person. Yes, a certain level of this learned behavior: With dedicated effort and practice, I can develop that skill and get better about distractions. However, my baseline is still lower and my progress will be slower than a neurotypical person. Crutches like this help me preserve mental energy for my day-to-day tasks instead of spending a significant portion of my mental energy fighting the urge to check my phone all day every day.
Just my perspective at least. I know everyone is different and I aspire to be the kind of person that doesn't need to employ blockers and safeguards just to ensure I don't end up getting sucked into doomscrolling for 2 hours, but right now I'm working with what I've got.
A good analogy is if you've ever tried to eat healthier and cut out most junk food from your diet. If you're anything like me, that is a LOT easier if you don't have a sleeve of oreos in the fridge and a quart of ice cream in the freezer, at least at first. Maybe after months and months of dedicated dieting, you can allow yourself to indulge in 1-2 cookies after dinner, but when you're first getting started, a cold turkey approach can be much easier, as you have to exercise a lot less willpower if the temptation isn't readily at hand.
Appreciate the perspective. I can see how it would help someone with ADHD.
For me it's a bit different: It's phases.
Some phases of extreme self-control, others where I tend to give in a bit more (usually induced by external stress).
But that tells me I have it in me to do it without external fences.
It’s about setting up systems that help you succeed even if you are not perfect. It’s about facing the fact that you don’t always have enough self control, and minimizing self destruction when that happens.
I guess it’s like when recovering alcoholics, though ideally should just “simply” have self control, in reality it’s about removing booze from your apartment, getting rid of triggers, changing habits, friends, etc.
Say you want to quit sugar or smoking. Would you still buy cigarettes or chocolate and carry it around in your pocket everywhere you go because you should rely on willpower to beat the addiction? Very few people do that because you become vulnerable when your willpower is at it's weakest.
Usually it works better to exercise willpower to constrain your future self's available actions. For example, by not buying chocolate or cigarettes when you are at the store.
The same principle applies to your phone. Use your willpower to constrain what your future self can do with it.
I totally get that, but for me I'd rather put in controls that make it easy to do the things I want, a la Atomic Habits.
Like, I want to eat healthier. I can try more self-control to not eat the Oreos in the pantry, or I can stop putting Oreos there. Putting guardrails on my devices is just easier to help me live the life I want.
But this is an act of self-control, op is the 'self' setting up the system. The primary target is not compulsive instinct, but time on the phone, but the beauty is that this in turn, will remove the compulsive instinct, because it's brittle. It's like their analogy to eating healthy in the post.
I think it can be starting point for some, then slowly reintroducing the distractions when they build up those muscles.
Feigning victimhood and zero agency is very trendy in certain circles, and you evidently get bonus points for these sorts of performantive theatrics, versus actually adressing the core of the issue.
It's not the phone, it's you...
I often leave the house without my iPhone. Here is my full stack:
- Ask wife to set up screen time passcode and not tell me
- Block social media and other distracting websites in Screen Time
- Set a 1 minute time limit on distracting apps
- Keep the phone in the garage as much as possible
- Get an Apple Watch cellular so that I can still communicate with people, make payments, get directions etc when I am out and about
Not a perfect dumb phone but this has helped me reduce usage tremendously.
Apple actually finally managed to allow 0 minutes as a time limit. Screen Time really needs to be finished by Apple, with a few more features, like more allowing certain apps at certain times (not just disallowing one set of apps at a certain time).
Yes, this was added a couple months ago!
And to top it off, in iOS 26 (Beta) you can set time limits for websites too! One feature I (and I'm sure many others) were waiting for since forever.
Thing is, Apple's not really interested in you using your phone LESS, so they don't really have an incentive to make it easier for you.
If you're going through the hassle of reseting your iPhone to set with Configurator, you should think about pair locking your phone while you're at it:
https://reincubate.com/support/how-to/pair-lock-supervise-ip...
I've been trying to do this too - paring down distracting apps, leaving only essentials like communication, maps, uber, etc. But my problem is what to do about the browser? I feel it's too essential to the "long tail" of uses (as the author put it), but also among the most distracting apps on my phone.
If anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them.
Something I've recently played with is a very 'dumb' android browser [0] able only to open and share links (and refresh the webpage), nothing else. Since I don't trust myself that I won't just click links from page to page I also configured the webview's client to disable links [1]. From this, you may be able to restrict yourself as much as you can since you could set a whitelist set of links you find 'indispensable'.
[0] https://github.com/rickgram/NoBrowser
[1] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/webapp...
If on Android, you can propably use something like rethinkdns and just block the worst timewasting websites for a while. Once you get used to not accessing reddit, youtube, prawnhub, whatever your poison is, the browser becomes boring again.
What works for me, and this might not be palatable to everyone, is to intentionally downgrade my phone to a worse experience to add friction. I am currently using an SE 2020 on purpose. This thing overheats like hell, if I try to do anything too intensive with it it starts stuttering like crazy. But that's actually perfect, it's what I want. It naturally reduces my use time because it can get annoying to use.
One thing I sense the author is ignoring is the pretty LARGE swath of third party apps that do something of the like but in a much more user-friendly form factor. Most are targeted towards parents and teens, but surely there's no reason you basically couldn't use it on yourself. I'm thinking of things like Qustodio and the like. It should still allow you to massively restrict the iPhone, there's a little bit of friction involved with undoing it -- but not as insane as the entire iPhone reset -- and you can much more easily on the fly make custom changes to it as you go about it. I'd probably spring for something like that if I found screen time or self-control to be an issue before going full-in on something like configurator which I think would be very, very hard to iterate settings with.
I've been doing what the author did for about a year using Configurator. I have the browser blocked completely. I found that I could still get around it by sending messages to myself in apps like Messenger and using the built-in browser.
So I ended up using an allow list for internet traffic with nothing allowed, which stopped that. What do you find you need the browser for?
In the UK it has become very common to need to scan a QR code on your table to order at a restaurant, which takes you to a website.
Most certainly you can still order at the bar the old fashioned way, but since COVID, physical menus have been removed, so how is your group meant to decide what it wants to order before one of you goes up on its behalf? (You cannot all go up if you want to hold the table.)
I don't even particularly mind the experience of using the website; the interface enables the display of all ingredients & allows you to specify allergens they need to avoid. If the kitchen runs out of an item, they can mark it as unavailable in the webpage. Finally, fighting to order at a busy bar was never a fun experience to begin with (it is the norm in non-fine-dining experiences in the UK to not have your order taken at your table.) But, this does require you allow arbitrary internet access on your device, which complexifies the blocking situation.
Yes it's exactly the one-off situations like that, which aren't super often but occur enough to greatly inconvenience someone without a pocket browser.
That totally makes sense!
The pattern that finally seems to work for me is to use Freedom to block all scrolly crap specifically on mobile. If I want to dig through YouTube or look something up on Reddit that’s fine, but I have to physically go to a machine that’s not always in my pocket.
At least so far I don’t need any of the things I’ve blocked on the go.
I'm a real app minimalist, only basic stuff for day to day living, but the browser is what sucks my life away.
I've tried things like Leechblock, but they don't stick.
The only thing that's really worked is turning the damn thing off and sticking it in a drawer. I managed it for a week once. Hard to keep to though.
i've been using the blank spaces launcher for this. it has its flaws for sure, but the feature most useful for the scenario you describe is the "Lock Distractions" feature. In order to use safari, you have to go through a "mindfulness" exercise, and then you can unlock safari for a small amount of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, up to 20). I find this is just enough to keep me out of random wikipedia pages all day, but still allows me to pull up a webpage when i need to do some very specific task (like unsubscribe from an email list).
A small lock on the browser, something as simple as the math problems some people use to stop their alarm in the morning might be a sufficient stopgap from mindless browser use.
Needs to come back every five minutes or so.
I vaguely remember someone here saying what worked for them was to add a fair amount of artificial lag to browsing, so that loading a page would actually be painfully slow.
I find the mobile web is doing a great job of destroying the addictiveness of the browser. I use an se2 so not terribly old. new reddit doesn't really work at all on it. old reddit just barely. Most other websites seem to hang after trying to load all the adware and never return the full content anymore. Some mobile websites just flat out don't load at all anymore, just a white screen like the phone rolled over and gave up.
Hacker news is about the only website that works. But, once you find a couple threads you are interested in you are rate limited from replying before long and that frustration kicks me off it until days later potentially.
install the browser if you need it, uninstall it when youre done
>Maybe you’re at a restaurant and they need you to open a website for example.
Maybe I'll open the door and leave for a different restaurant.
Came to write something along these lines. I do this for restaurants, and sometimes for the places that refuse to take cash. But I do not have hope that such behaviour will impact the restaurants' policies: it's usually chains or non-owner-ran places that will have a "high-tech" policy and I am not sure if this kind of feedback reaches the decision makers.
But these days (for now) finding another restaurant is easy. The author mentions that his gym requires having a smartphone. Now, that's a much bigger problem.
I was at a gym once that decided they wanted to do facial recognition for check-ins. I canceled my membership instantly (and told them why). Am I out of touch, or is that creepy beyond all reason?
I am assuming that if you asked, they'd give you a printed menu. You don't have to be difficult about it.
I don't always need the dead tree version of the menu. Those do create extra work for the staff. And I am assuming they need constant replacement. Kids will drop food on them all the time.
Yeah it's definitely annoying. Recently I was at a kiosk for Turkish Airlines, and they _really_ didn't want to print the boarding pass. They wanted to send a text instead.
Thanks for this. I'm setting it up now, works for me as advertised. My screen time jumped a lot in the last couple weeks and my mental health has declined in proportion.
I use Freedom, but it's a bit glitchy and too easy to delete the app if you really want to cheat.
I'm waffling a bit on the default-deny approach to websites. I think that might cause serious headaches since e.g. scanning QR codes to interact with businesses is pretty common. But I will give it a try.
Update: it took me a couple hours to get everything set up the way I like it after resetting the phone, but so far this is fantastic. I also massively restricted notifications, which had gotten a bit out of hand.
Congratulations!
I myself independently arrived where the author is over years of self experimentation, but I think you'll get used to it in no more than a month.
I even use a whitelist (i.e. default-deny) for websites on my work laptop these days. I have ADHD though, YMMV.
Alternate solution I haven’t seen anywhere else:
1. Screen time to disable browser, App Store etc.
2. Type random 4-digit passwords until you forget.
3. Use your own Apple account as reset.
4. Remove apple password from password manager. Store in “Notes” app or similar on computer.
5. Lock this app storing password behind mandatory typing of gibberish using Cold Turkey on desktop.
Works well for me.
I will mention that as a younger person who grew up with internet access, I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age or have fought them off and forgotten what it’s like to literally lose control of your actions, especially when its normalized around you.
I’ve noticed a lot of older people don’t see the internet as a threat in the same way as I do, and I envy that.
Living with phones like this is completely unnatural.
Dude...
> I get the feeling that the “just be disciplined” comment often comes from people who didn’t have these addictive habits seared into their minds from an early age
I had the exact same mentality as you. I wrote the exact same stuff right here on HN, you can check my older comments. I did the same stuff, the lengths I went to lock down my devices...
That's not the case, older people are not immune because they grew up with less tech or anything. It's (probably) just you.
Turns out I actually objectively had far worse self-control than other people. Turns out I was living life really in hard mode while everybody else were coasting with ease. Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD all my childhood, nobody noticed because my school grades were mostly fine.
Go get checked. My life turned over completely with treatment.
Can’t you click the “ignore limit” button when trying to open a restricted app though?
No, the password sets a strict block.
I think this guide is nice, and having a variety of articles like this is great so everybody can look at the different ideas and find what's right for them.
I would urge people to consider going a little bit further than this guide, consider not using your phone as a reading device. Imagine deciding to sit down with a physical book, but keeping your phone nestled on the opposite page as you read. It would be a lot nicer to read without interruption, without being exposed to notifications at all times. Sure there are going to be use cases where the phone is more convenient, but I think sacrificing convenience is worth it.
I’m in denial about needing to curb some pretty bad habits so won’t comment on that.
But! I have a fairly “smart” home for controlling my lights, etc. I control it with Siri and the Home app. When friends/family with iPhones stay with me, I just add them as a guest.
Just left town for a few weeks leaving my home & dog to a sitter… with an android. I’ve got an old iPhone that I ended up doing all of the Screen Time/Parental Controls hacks to lock down to must a smart remote. I didn’t love the result. I’m looking forward to using the OP’s post to guide me in making a better dumbphone/smart remote. Thanks!
I'll shout out Clearspace[1]. They're YC W23[2]. I am in no way affiliated with them.
I find the app is very useful. I do find it still takes some discipline, but it adds enough friction into accessing pointless apps, that it makes a real dent in my doom-scrolling. It isn't cheap, but it works well enough that at the current price point, I will pay.
[1] - https://www.getclearspace.com/ [2] - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clearspace
Using iOS 26 with the glassy-reflective elements feels like a storm in a teacup with making people even more addicted to their phones the moment they pick them up, observing all the shiny effects with a slight tilt of their wrist.
I wish Apple would open up customization capabilities to properly kick the addictive elements from the phone, like Android with custom launchers...
I've also experimented with Apple Configurator many months ago but unfortunately it's too tedious for most people wanting to enforce a simplified phone, but its beauty is in its level of power of creating a bespoke iPhone experience.
fwiw I'm the maker of the Dumb Phone app (dp) that somebody mentioned below and what's mostly kept my daily average screen time to 1-2 hours is getting rid of the addictive elements from the home screen.
No more color, icons, fancy wallpapers, just a simple single-colored text-based list of my most essential apps that open when tapped. Zero social media.
We live in 2025 and as much as i'd love to experiment with a nerfed feature phone, I personally need a high quality camera each day, maps of course, banking apps, authenticators, etc.
Kicking that dopamine hit has helped me use my phone as a utility again, otherwise I put it away. I have an Apple Watch too with all alerts turned off except for calls, texts - so another reason to keep the phone down.
Since I also run a business I do need to leverage mobile social apps, so these now all live on a "separate" iPhone which stays in a drawer until I need to perform a particular task with it, then it goes back in right away.
Genuinely feels good to have my phones work for me now rather than the other way around, and I see a lot of common sentiment when I speak to people who have also done the same thing to their phones.
Highly recommend cleaning up your Home Screen as a good starting point, and purge your notifications.
edit: I also begrudgingly installed Beeper last week to keep in touch with an important group chat on FB messenger on the main phone, but it's bliss only seeing a list of group messages vs the long list of story buttons along the top in the main app, green and red dots, so i'm not inclined to tap around afterwards.
One way to achieve this is to set the interface to monochrome.
Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Color Filters -> Monochrome
It becomes instantly less appealing.
The grayscale is honestly amazing.
On newer iPhones, tap the right button three times and your whole phone goes black and white. It becomes way less engaging to use.
What’s wrong with Screen Time and having your spouse define the PIN for it? I can request an additional minute myself, but after that only my spouse can grant me an exception.
Well, you need a spouse.
You can also use an online time-lock service such as lockmeout.online to store the PIN for ScreenTime or assistive access (even better as it dumb down the UI).
Years ago I had this problem, but I didn't know about these services, so I had to keep the PIN data myself without being able to access it on a whim. I developed timelock for this purpose: https://github.com/rayanamal/timelock
It is possible to supervise your phone AND keep all your data. I've done it to my phone. https://www.techlockdown.com/guides/restore-full-backup-supe... When you do it, be sure to Disable Stolen Device Protection and "Find my iPhone" on both devices.
"you can actually disable the App Store! This is a marvelous win."
I thought this one was weird, personally. The App Store is among those I use least on my phone. I only open it when there is a specific new app I want to install (which is rare; I have maybe a dozen apps installed that didn't come with my phone). I easly go months without opening the App Store.
Are there people just browsing the App Store daily?
Well if you disable App Store you cannot re-install apps you find distracting that you have removed. I actually remove Play store from my android through the debug shell for this exact reason. And yes, it happens that when all other apps are gone, things like Ebay, Foodora, App store etc are scrolled mindlessly, it's a hierarchy of stimulation, you remove one and move on to the next best one. Congratulations that you don't have adhd, it's hell
I think the idea is that you do not install time wasters (social media?) apps before disabling the app store. This way, even if tempted, you won't be able to doomscroll on Instagram because you cannot install it.
This is very cool to see.
I've been playing around with the idea of getting an old iphone just for car play and dumbphone purposes. However, I always discarded the idea due to the lack of control iOS gives you in restricting and customizing certain things. But now, this Apple configurator gives me a bit more motivation to make that jump, even though I probably wont be able to use it for all my specific needs.
I also ended up experimenting for a few months with the Samsung G1650 which runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow. I was able to get apps like Termux and other utilities on it which made my experience what I wanted while also not compromising on having no modern messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It wasnt a complete dumbphone per se, but it was almost impossible to doomscroll or browse the internet on that phone.
In the end I stopped using my G1650 due to the fact that it was too tedious waiting 5+ minutes for poorly optimized apps like Spotify/Taxi apps to load. Also, the phone became expontentially slower with more storage being used, which is expected since wasnt really made to storage gigs of message and media logs.
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
This is interesting because I suspect most people use their phone while doing other things. I’m in a meeting commenting on this article with my phone. I’ve got maybe 15min a day of “I’m only paying attention to my phone” but I have 4-5 hours of phone screen time. Maybe I’m unusual though.
Seems way too common. People pull out their phone at every commercial break, lull in conversation, or stoplight. People's attention span is cooked.
You also accumulate screen time if you are using navigation while commuting, etc. I easily rack up 2 hours daily just from driving to my workplace and back home, so there are definitely some "passive" ways to increase those numbers.
I think focusing on numerical stats here is also a bit of a problem and while making these guardrails might help some people but the main issue should be addressed (overconsumption/addiction).
I wonder by reducing the screen time of the phone, how the screen time of the other devices (computer/tv/etc) changed.
Same here. I also "watch youtube" while doing chores, and the screen is on all the time, because while I mostly listen to the voice, sometimes they show things that I want to see immediately. A second use is that I'm monitoring something using my phone, so it sits around as a second screen basically.
So really, the phone is often a "second monitor".
Just uninstalling the endless scrolling apps (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc.) was enough for me.
Unfortunately some of us use Instagram specifically to keep in touch with people (IG DMs). and Meta does not seem to want to split off the messaging from the main app the same way they did with FB messenger for some reason (I would love it if they did). For Twitter, some of us need it for work as well (lots of interesting AI research published directly to Twitter). Reddit is definitely pure entertainment yeah. But there are nuances.
Twitter, I uninstalled the app and used via the browser for about a year until I finally gave it the boot outright.
Similarly, I felt I needed it to “keep in touch” with people, but I ultimately decided the psychic tax was too high to maintain some lukewarm friendships when I have perfectly good ones in meatspace.
But you can talk to people on Instagram from FB Messenger.
https://help.instagram.com/654906392080948
Doesn't seem like this is possible anymore?
This was a huge one for me. Remember spending so much time posting and reading twitter and insta feeds when I was in car with my wife. Totally different now. We talk and converse about what's going on with our kids, stuff at work, its way better. We both feel much more connected.
I also turned off all notifications from all my apps, period end of story. My battery lasts for days and its not completely distracting. Made a huge difference in my ability to focus.
I ended up doing this with Screen Time, but not knowing my own passcode. Having a partner or close friend is generally the approach I'd recommend, but you can also do this with iPhone Mirroring — I wrote up a how to guide in https://blog.alexbeals.com/posts/setting-an-unknown-screen-t....
>"Dumbphone"
>installs e-reader apps, password apps, ridehailing/rental apps, music apps, gym apps, dev apps, home apps, "Your Internet Provider" apps (?)
???
I get that some of these are essential, but including home automation and gym apps is really pushing the definition of a "dumb phone". It just sounds like the author wants to avoid installing tiktok and games when he's talking about a "dumb phone".
Author here:
Ultimately all of these apps were essential for me. "Your Internet Provider" is a funny one -- for some reason XFinity kept failing to charge my credit card. I would come home to find an angry girlfriend without WiFI. I had to install the app to keep some tabs on it, until their autopayment bug was fixed.
One thing I like about this setup is that you can decide which apps are 'essential' for you.
>I had to install the app to keep some tabs on it, until their autopayment bug was fixed.
There's no web portal? If so, having the app might make the experience more pleasant, but it's hardly "essential".
You know what, fair point. I deleted XFinity from my phone, and removed it from the essay.
I originally did this because the negative experience of losing the internet was really high, but on reflection I think I'll have other warning signs. They did try to call
A dumb phone should really be like... 3 retro style games, calculator, sms and calling.
I'd argue you can just stick to default iPhone apps and be fine.
Here's what worked for me - after trying screen limits, nokia phones
1. Remove all social media apps from iPhone 2. Use Opal in deep focus mode to block apps and websites (I can't exit the deep focus mode - but I allow myself a 2 hour window when deepfocus isn't active) 3. Keep my phone inside my bag - out of sight out of mind 4. Remove "tap to wake up" in settings - you'll have to click the side button to see the screen 5. Deleted slack and email - was hesitant about missing important notifications, but decided to try for a week and realized it made no difference to my work
> Maybe you’re at a restaurant and they need you to open a website for example. You may end up having to bug some people around you for their phone. It can be annoying but I haven’t found this to be too troublesome.
I have been using a profile-based restricted iPhone setup for about 6 months now, and this has been the biggest holdup for me. I've pretty successfully blocked almost everything distracting, but I'm pretty good at finding ways to bypass my restrictions. e.g., I'll find an alternative Reddit client (like Redlib) to bypass my Reddit blocks.
The obvious solution is to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist, but then you completely lose the ability to scan QR codes in the wild.
I'm thinking of building a browser designed for this purpose. Your browsing can begin at certain pre-defined entrypoints, like a news aggregator or a QR code, but you can't manually enter arbitrary URLs or use search engines.
They have menus. Every place I’ve been to (post-Covid) that tries to force the “use-your-phone” thing brought me a menu when I asked and said I didn’t have my phone.
> Your browsing can begin at certain pre-defined entrypoints, like a news aggregator or a QR code
I would definitely use this.
I've tried so many things like this over the years and considered Configurator, but my only Apple computer at this point is a corporate Mac that blocks USB access to my phone. It's a great idea, and I'm glad to see it documented.
That said, the biggest shift I encountered in my own phone usage was when I got an Aro box [1]. It's expensive (I got one refurbished), but pretty, and functional, and it has made a HUGE difference in my phone habits. I no longer keep my phone in my bedroom and when I catch myself ignoring those around me in favor of my phone, I can hard cut that off by putting it in the box.
I like the idea of simplifying your phone with software tweaks like this, but I have found the physical separation to be the most freeing, and encourage that if you're interested in freeing yourself from the screen.
[1] https://www.goaro.com/for-families
My idea to give my son a dumbed-down phone one day was to only install a terminal on it, and maybe chatgpt. And give him access to a server via tailscale. Then he could do whatever a terminal could do, except without the audiovisual or socialnetworking dopamine fixes. And retain all the basic phone functionality.
He needs uber. He needs google maps. Mostly it's not just about looking up information, it's about functionality.
Who "needs" Uber or Google Maps? Especially a kid?
I could permit those apps.
And convenience too, to an extent
somewhat simpler but paid (but pricey at $10 month) solution i’ll shill for is Opal. only app i’ve used that can actually lock app, set time limits, etc w a pretty great UI and config setup
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1497465230
Wow! It is crazy how much money people will to pay for such problems.
I restrict myself from distractions by disabling hosts via custom rules in my nextdns account. It is enough and free.
For those that are looking for something more advanced in the Android space a friend of mine built https://limitphone.com/ to handle something like this. It requires a reset, but comes with a lot more options.
Looks very interesting. The price is not good. I mean, we have to do it for 4 fones, that is 120 dollars per year, which is a lot of money, not in it's own, but it ads up with other subscriptions. The trial is too short, i think a months will be better.
Requires more setup, but you can use ownDroid to do this manually. Though it can't filter apps it doesn't know about (no smart filters)
https://github.com/BinTianqi/OwnDroid
The built in iPhone time limits work well if you have a partner - simply have them set the password and keep it secret.
You want to spend more time scrolling on twitter?
Fine, muster up the courage to ask your wife for it while she preps school lunches for the kids.
I'm on the exact same journey as OP but I think I have a solution that is a little easier to setup.
Simply use Apple's Screen Time but lock all of the Screen Time settings behind a pin. Have a friend or loved one create the pin and keep it secret from you and voila.
With Screen time you can have an "Always Allowed" list and if you use the "Downtime" setting it doesn't actually let you set limits past a one minute exception per app.
You also have to make sure that the downtime setting is 24 hours of downtime.
*Edit: seems like a lot of people are suggesting the same exact thing.
Love this, I created Foqos which is FOSS (free & open source sw). The idea is to use physical switches like QR codes or NFC tags to block apps. Its free to try and just requires an install. Worth checking out if this doesn't work out for you.
Just checked out Foqos -- have seen others mention it in the thread too. Great work!
thank you! Repo here: https://github.com/awaseem/foqos
So "dumbphone" now means "runs only a preselected by me set of apps"? I thought it meant "phone with no app functionality whatsoever, only capable of voice, text, and other basic cell network services"?
This is what I do as well. I actually see so much interest for this sort of "dumb smartphone" in some demographics that I seriously intend to start a company selling configured iPhones at some point.
Shout out to TechLockdown (not my company) for making this sort of setup much easier to accomplish.
Yeah! Tech Lockdown makes this easy. https://www.techlockdown.com/apple-config-generator
For me, I can push through and not install the social media apps. I have noticed I'll start doing some other screen time activity like browsing HN more, or news site. The usefulness is higher but still am unable to trade off total screen time.
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
If you spend 4 hours/24 hours on your phone then every 20X you'll have lost 3.33... X.
I think the author is using year and waking-years but it doesn't parse well for me because you don't get close to 20 waking-years for every 20 years.
Could this be used as an alternative to Parental Controls? Appple's implementation of parental controls is so deficient that it gives me PTSD every time I need to configure it.
Author here: I think this could work great for parental controls. A really determined kid with a laptop or the willingness to factory reset their iphone could get around it. But outside of this I _think_ it's worth trying.
Well shoot. I just ordered a Mudita Kompakt (minimalist smartphone) to help tackle my phone addiction. Seeing the Apple Configurator allows me to define what apps can be installed and the ability to remove official apps such as Safari or the App Store, now I'm wondering if I just want to stick to my iPhone and do this or use my Kompakt when it arrives.
One thing to keep in mind is that supervising via Apple Configurator (without a hosted MDM server) means you lose Activation Lock protection.
You can create and install a profile to (re)-enable it. Just by default unless a profile (or MDM) solution allows "User Linked" activation lock (via Find My), the default is only to allow "Org Linked" activation.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/depf4ab94ef...
It's ironic what's useful is making the phone effectively into a Palm OS phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS
Perhaps focussing on productivity and helping users like these devices did/had to instead of being consumption devices is a way to explore?
The best use I have for dumbphones is install VLC to access the NAS music server or your favorite music stream service (I use radioparadise) and play on the stereo.
The Apple Configurator seems like a great tool to setup a phone for your children or tech illiterate elderly parents. Many of us would have people in our lives who might actually understand how to use their phone if the only icons on the home screen where messages and phone. I could imagine ChatGPT would be a good option for them to be able to look up information in the real world.
I have been doing this exact same thing for about a year, this guy is basically me! I love it so far. One difference with his setup, I also set up my Configurator profile so that I can only navigate to whitelisted websites, and I haven't whitelisted anything. This means I have no browser whatsoever (even the in-app ones, like in Maps or FB Messenger, don't work).
I did a CRTL+F for "Jamf" in this thread and didn't see it mentioned, but I would say if you're going through the effort of Apple Configurator then it makes sense to go the next mile and get some kind of MDM software that will make future updates and policies easier to apply.
As a bonus, if you're a parent and have kids it'll be very useful for them.
I'll have to remember this when I next get a new phone so I don't have to wipe my current device.
I don't understand the addition, and the gimmicks people come up not to check their phones.
Maybe it is because I was already an adult, when the very first generation of mobile phones became affordable, those that only did calls, SMS wasn't even part of it.
I can easily go out and leave phone at home, or don't feel the urge to check it every 5 minutes.
That’s great! Genuinely. We all struggle with our own vices.
I loved when I worked in a place with a beer fridge -chilling out on a Friday afternoon when it was sunny in Dublin was great - but for any alcoholics around it probably was hell. On the other hand, I hate it when places have free lunch and snacks because I am a compulsive eater.
Is there any way to do this with Android? I'd wish to get a modern snappy phone with a great camera but completely locked down.
One trick, even though it doesn't "lock it down" the same way, is to use a minimalist launcher. Check out OLauncher. It is a text-based launcher, it only has room for a few apps on the homepage, and it discourages fiddling with your phone.
https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher?tab=readme-ov-file
https://github.com/tstromberg/quietude is how I manage my Pixel phone as well as my kids; I begin with “quietude.sh disable all”, but usually re-enable maps.
It takes a similar approach to the OP - changing restrictions requires a USB cable and a computer.
andoff[1] works well. I use it to lock down DNS settings to nextdns to block all the sites I want. Then I use lockmeout[2] to lock opening andoff to change the settings.
Also there is limitphone[3], but it has less settings and is easier to uninstall than andoff, but works via the same mechanism.
1: https://docs.andoff.one/ 2: https://www.teqtic.com/lock-me-out 3: https://limitphone.com/
https://github.com/BinTianqi/OwnDroid
On LineageOS 22 this is what I did:
* Remove Jelly browser with `adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 org.lineageos.jelly`
* Disable F-Droid so you can't install another browser on a whim with `adb shell pm disable-user org.fdroid.fdroid`
Author here: I think so! A reader shared with me that they used the adb cli to remove all the apps they didn't want, including the Play Store.
You could also just ask a spouse or family member to set your screen time pw and disable safari. Install parental controlled browser like Spin Browser. And also disable image loading in the settings of Spin Browser. This was a small but significant factor in screen time. Just the images on websites! No more limbic over stimulation!
I have more issues with self control on my computer than on my smartphone. Anyone's got any tips for that one?
Are you using a desktop or laptop? I used to carry my laptop around with me to use whenever wherever as designed, and found myself always using it. Setting aside a dedicated desk space where I limit the use of the laptop made it much easier to just think of it as desktop and less mobile. Now, using it feels like I'm at work, and it is much easier to walk away from it.
Finding other things to do when bored instead of opening a browser is key. You're going to fill the time with something, so you have to find the something else.
There was K9 Web Protection but it was ended in 2019 by Symantec. It was perfect because after setting up password you had to wait one week to unblock it back again :)
You can try LeechBlock. It works as plugin in all browsers.
First thirty seconds are the worst for will :)
So it is better to ask a relative/friend/parent/spouse to set up a password for you - then you cannot unblock the sites back again without them.
I tried LeechBlock and others but even when i enable the most extreme options, i just press right click and remove extension. Bypassing everything.
What worked for me: working in person with others.
I found that it's much harder for me to procrastinate on my laptop when I am working with peers. The repeated focus time on the laptop during work hours 'conditioned' me to use it for work more.
But how much time are you losing to a commute?
I kind of agree with you in a way as I ultimately think that working remote is a bit harder on social health and maybe even physical health of getting out of the house, but in another way I just don't know if I can go back to all the negatives of the office.
I mean, my toilet at home washes my ass with gentle warm water. The work toilet randomly decides to splash toilet water on me with the violent "automatic" flusher after I'm done wiping myself with transparent sandpaper.
You don’t need the other person to be in the same room - a video call works just fine. In fact, it can be even better for productivity since there's less chit-chat.
It is my anecdotal experience that a whole bunch of my current friends are from a pre-pandemic in-office job and I’ve made zero lasting friendships at my remote jobs.
Write your own hosts file and block all websites you don’t want to visit.
Switch to a desktop!
pomodoro
I would use mine as a dumb phone but the apps are useful.
I don’t have any social media apps on mine though. That’s what kills you.
Yep that is half the job done already!
I did a “soft dumbphone” too: a Focus that only allows Phone/Texts/Maps/Camera. Screen Time has a passcode my partner keeps, and an automation re-enables the Focus if I toggle it off. Keeps utility, kills the slot-machine pull.
afaik installing a configuration profile isn't supported with lockdown mode, so you have to pick one. but neat hack. I've installed hosted-profiles (.mobileconfig) files without factory-reset, curious why didn't you go for that route? Just to make it harder?
> lockdown mode
That's interesting. I didn't know about lockdown mode. Noting!
> I've installed hosted-profiles (.mobileconfig) files without factory-reset, curious why didn't you go for that route?
Afaik the only way to disable the App Store is to go through this schlep of a factory reset and having Configurator prepare the phone for 'supervision'.
So you don't have to go through the factory reset if you are fine with having the app store? Safari is the only app I need to excise, and the OS won't let me delete it.
> installing a configuration profile isn't supported with lockdown mode
You can disable lockdown mode, install the .mobileconfig, enable lockdown mode again. Which is what I did with https://apple.nextdns.io
You can install mobileconfig files without factory-reset, but I've found some settings won't "take" until the phone is supervised.
If you disable the App Store, as OP claims to, does that also stop installed apps receiving updates?
No.
Source: Used to do enterprise Apple MDM for a living.
Does it block installing PWA's? Or are those linked to safari?
I think it will block using the PWA's, unless you add their bundle id to the allow list
I think it only disable the icon, not underlying frameworks, etc
I have App Store disabled on my kids iPad and it does disable updates. I have to manually re-enable it and install updates every few days.
I also searched for this and couldn’t find an answer.
It's strange to call a device with access to Claude and ChatGPT a "dumbphone"
Strangely enough, I found Claude and ChatGPT crucial to making all this work.
In the essay:
> Whenever I need some information, I can just ask my LLM, and it can give me a distraction free summary. It helps the long-tail of weird situations too: for example if someone asks me to take a look at a website, I can ask my LLM to scrape it and summarize the details for me. It’s pretty hard to get distracted this way.
I find google searches distracting, I can only imagine what an AI chat must be like. I use a flip phone.
or a twisted way in calling Claude and ChatGPT dumb which I wouldn't disagree with myself
The only problem I see with this is that you can’t update your app if you disable the App Store. My bank updates its app annoyingly often, with no grace period - which is bad when you’re in a store and need to pay for stuff.
I was looking into doing something similar recently. Thanks for the timely post!
one underrated approach more and more people are finding success with: apple watch ultra as a primary device (optionally with a case for a more phone-like factor)
you can do most things an iphone does, but you can't doom scroll. you don't have to eject out of apple ecosystem, you get payments, 2fa, navigation, notifications. your iphone can remain as a backup that's always in sync for when you need it (e.g. traveling)
> I can only access the apps and websites I want to use
not really a dumb phone is it?
Or just enable Screen Time and ask another person to set up the pin for you. No need to install any software and play with profiles.
> I tried Screen Time but it was too easy to ignore.
My spouse and I set passcodes on each other's Screen Time. Make sure you also check the option to block at end. Problem solved.
Is there a way not to loose info on the phone, such as contacts?
If you use iCloud, you should still be able to get back your contacts, photos, etc.
I love how we spend hundreds on a computer in our pocket and then spend a large amount of time trying to reduce the amount of value we get out of it.
Better to have a limited data plan like Roamless(data doesn't expire) and stock up on epubs. Then when your away from wifi all you can do is read books.
I found screentime does work - I activated it for my spouse and only I know the PIN. It limits her social media and YT time to 45m/day.
Would this be good to multi-profile an iPhone for crossing borders? A "travel across borders" blueprint, and a "through the border" blueprint?
Oh, that's a cool idea! I think that would work. You would still need to connect to your laptop twice, to switch the profiles. Outside of that it could work great! Would have to think about what would make for a good 'travel across borders' blueprint.
I just block what I don't want with screen time. My wife sets and knows the passcode. I don't. So I can't override.
If smartphones were real computers, instead of expensive little closed portable TV's with cameras, we could run multiple VM's, each with their own network ID's, accounts, apps, etc.
Maybe these sexy AI LLM's can help us root all these closed devices and OS's, instead of being used to write yet another stupid web app faster?
One of my daughters has dumbed down her phone. I was hoping it was a generational thing — the twenty-somethings are saying fuck off to phones.
Me, I barely use my phone. But then I'm stuck a laptop guy/generation.
I would love to be able to turn off Instagram Reels on iOS like is apparently possible on Android.
Is it possible on Android? How? I would love for this ability to exist
are you only trying to access Insta DM's instead?
I call it Phonevorce and I've done pretty well by
- Using AdGuard's pattern matching to block URLs I found distracting (news sites, youtuble)
- Deleted all apps I spend too much time on (basically down to Discord where I have two or three communities I check in on)
- Leaving my phones in the other room all day
- Turning all notifications off except for a very small select few whose (calls only) go through
- Deleting all social media (still have HackerNews (computer only), Discord)
It's great! Love it. Fuck your phone. I use mine to check bank accounts, do Spanish flash cards, and occasionally to look at housing and life is calmer and nicer and I get more done.
Too bad iPhone is a dumbphone fromt the get go :D
> blocks social media because too addictive
> allows llms
I wonder what the author is doing with those 2 extra hours of time he's not using his phone.
I use my phone a lot, but I never feel like it's taking away from me doing anything else.
> 2 extra hours of time he's not using his phone.
Mostly reading. The 2 hours was a win for me, but the thing I appreciated even more was the that I feel less distracted throughout the day.
I remember reading about Ozempic, and how it "turns off the background food noise" that people have. I didn't realize this, but for me I have a "background notifications noise", which this hack has helped reduce.
I don’t doubt it. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed with these addicting apps, I delete some temporarily and just the fact I don’t have them in my phone anymore feels like some part of my mind that was being dragged down is finally freed.
I just made a similar transition a few weeks ago.
I just often felt like I wasn't making progress on various things I've been wanting to, that I used to do, and for which I kept telling myself I don't have time. And it wasn't difficult to tell where my time was going based on the Screen Time app.
For me, I've drawn the line at endless feeds, which for me, was Reddit and Facebook. And for the first week or two, I was often catching myself in a split-second of boredom just opening up one or the other (just to be greeted by an error message). Now that instinct is gone.
I don't think I was as bad as the people endlessly doom-scrolling through TikTok, but it was certainly bad enough that I felt like I didn't have enough free time to work toward life goals that were outside my work time. And it's a lot better now.
Going back to reading magazines and shampoo bottles in the bathroom?
OP is using LastPass still, oof...
There’s another solution, much faster, it’s to use Screen Time and have your partner own the passcode. I hold my partner’s phone passcode and it’s fantastic to control when he’s allowed to doom scroll
I can't believe how much stuff he configured on a "dumbphone"
why not:
- phone app
- messages
- calendar
- clock
- notes
- reminders
Author here: those already come with the standard iPhone setup.
I understood.
But I say, don't install your list, and further uninstall "extra" apple apps.
I know you don't need apple tv+ or apple news
do you really need mail?
I wonder if you even need safari?
Seems like way more work than learning to be disciplined.
> Seems like way more work than learning to be disciplined.
Are you disciplined about everything you need/want to be disciplined about? Food, exercise, sleep, reading, work, family... You've got it all dialed to a perfection, yes? If not, why not? It is after all easy to learn to be disciplined.
I cant believe people have to do this...what a world! nice to have the option I guess!
I don't think the author has to do this. They just prefer to.
Aside from not having a phone, how could someone not have the option?
I really want to thank you for this comment; how it gave a well-needed jolt to my pride and taste for discipline.
> getting the right setup takes a few weeks, and you may need to rely on others.
Lol
Not really on the topic of the post, but I love the active reader count on the top.
Not good