I don’t think I’m the only one concerned about the time we spend looking at apps with content that provides little to us and our attention spans being shortened. Don’t get me wrong, everything has its time and we all need to disconnect at some point, but I personally want to reduce my screen time.
Some time ago I discovered this “trend” on reddit in which people share their experiences buying old phones to use less social networks and have less distractions. Or the (extremely small) market for new smartphones focused on reducing distractions like the Light Phone or the Hisense with e-ink screen. Of course this has a counterpart: there are certain modern applications that are really useful and do not work on these old phones or are not comfortable to use in these new “limited” phones.
In the end I came to the conclusion (like other people) that the best thing to do is to “dumb down” your current smartphone… or what I’m going to do: make it boring.
On my last trip to Tokyo I bought the iPhone 15 Pro Max taking advantage of the currency exchange (yes, when I am in Japanese territory this smartphone makes shutter sound to prevent sneaky photos). I like to upgrade my iPhone whenever I can, especially for the camera improvements, but that doesn’t mean I want to be using it excessively.
So with the premise “the best dumbphone is the one you already have” I decided to work on a customization layer that despite not limiting what I can do with it, it avoids distractions and getting into the loop of checking apps just for the fact of having them installed.
The first thing I wanted to try is to imitate the eInk screen of my Kindle Paperwhite. It’s not the same (or fancy like the Daylight), but the effect is quite convincing:
- Matte tempered glass: I love the effect that is achieved, it avoids a lot of reflections and has a much nicer feel almost like a paper.
- Night Shift: warm illumination of the screen is how I always use the Kindle.
- Black and white screen: assigned to a triple tap of the iPhone power button from the accessibility options.
At software level I’ve made several adjustments to simplify the homescreen. An important decision is to keep the minimum number of visible applications, in my case 8 and of course only those essential ones that do not lead to long periods of distraction. I have also hidden all app pages to keep only the main homescreen.
To maintain a monochromatic aesthetic coherence I have modified the appearance of the app icons by creating shortcuts using these nice eInk Icons.
At the time I’m writing this we still have iOS17, so we can’t move the app icons freely yet (it will be available in iOS18), so I’ve used the Blank Widget App to generate empty spaces (top) on the homescreen.
It may seem silly, but having to think about what you want to check surprisingly reduces the time you spend on “useless” apps (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, …) because most of the time I opened them it was because they were THERE.
Having all the possibilities there is great, but knowing that it takes a bit of effort to open these apps and enable the color makes me not open them in situations that have strangely become common (randomly during a TV show, waiting for the elevator, subway, …) and makes me more aware of the world around me.
