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.
> 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 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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 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....
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'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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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"?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
No one tells you because they want you to use their app but most can be replaced by floss apps running on your laptop.
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
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.
Huge, thanks, somehow missed it. Smart TV UIs are begging for this mode too, for users to whom aesthetic is irrelevant.
> people with cognitive disabilities
Does… does my phone addiction and inability for self-control qualify as this?
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).
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.
yep, latest iphone has satellite texting that works almost everywhere. and soon t mobile is offering fully satellite data access :(
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.
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.
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.
I'm curious, have you tried this? Would love to learn what you jotted down.
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'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.
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).
Cost you or saved you from... ?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
I didn't even notice that there was a counter before I opened the HN comments.
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)?
Wow I'm the creator of Foqos, thanks for the shoutout <3
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
People live different lives
>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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
The default setting is always king
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.
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
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.
And convenience too, to an extent
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).
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'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
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.
pretty sure if you un-downtime a non-safari browser it applies to all websites.
> 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.
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 :)
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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....
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.
Can’t you click the “ignore limit” button when trying to open a restricted app though?
No, the password sets a strict block.
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
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.
>"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
But you can talk to people on Instagram from FB Messenger.
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.
Yeah! Tech Lockdown makes this easy. https://www.techlockdown.com/apple-config-generator
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Switch to a desktop!
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.
Write your own hosts file and block all websites you don’t want to visit.
pomodoro
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.
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?
You can install mobileconfig files without factory-reset, but I've found some settings won't "take" until the phone is supervised.
> 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
> 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.
I was looking into doing something similar recently. Thanks for the timely post!
> I can only access the apps and websites I want to use
not really a dumb phone is it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would love to be able to turn off Instagram Reels on iOS like is apparently possible on Android.
are you only trying to access Insta DM's instead?
Is it possible on Android? How? I would love for this ability to exist
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 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.
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.
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.
or a twisted way in calling Claude and ChatGPT dumb which I wouldn't disagree with myself
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"?
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 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?
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 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!
>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.
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.
Not really on the topic of the post, but I love the active reader count on the top.
Not good