Iphone Dumbphone

> 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'.

> installing a configuration profile isn't supported with lockdown mode

You can disable lockdown mode, install the .mobileconfig, enable lockdown mode again. Which is what I did with https://apple.nextdns.io

You can install mobileconfig files without factory-reset, but I've found some settings won't "take" until the phone is supervised.

Oh, that's a cool idea! I think that would work. You would still need to connect to your laptop twice, to switch the profiles. Outside of that it could work great! Would have to think about what would make for a good 'travel across borders' blueprint.

I 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.

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.

the only thing missing from this setup is the ability to unlock remotely (as I can with my kids' devices). for some reason apple won't let an adult (fully) manage the screen time of another adult.

my wife has the password for my screentime, but i can't send her a request if we're physically apart. which means i'm out of luck, or she has to share the actual code with me, which then requires her to change it (and remember the new one)

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

No.

Source: Used to do enterprise Apple MDM for a living.

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 think it only disable the icon, not underlying frameworks, etc

I also searched for this and couldn’t find an answer.

> 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 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?

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...

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"

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

I find google searches distracting, I can only imagine what an AI chat must be like. I use a flip phone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This was a huge one for me. Remember spending so much time posting and reading twitter and insta feeds when I was in car with my wife. Totally different now. We talk and converse about what's going on with our kids, stuff at work, its way better. We both feel much more connected.

I also turned off all notifications from all my apps, period end of story. My battery lasts for days and its not completely distracting. Made a huge difference in my ability to focus.

> I 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 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.

> 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.

My question, why do you need them on your phone during work hours? Why aren't you using a desktop/laptop/something else?

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?

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.

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.

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.

You can probably just use the UPS/FedEx/Amazon apps to get those notifications instead anyway.

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.

I turn it on during job search. Like right now.

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...

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?"

> 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.

You can set email notifications (or any app) to deliver quietly. I made this change years ago for email and some social apps. You can go through the notifications when you check your phone but aren't distracted with it vibrating on every email.

>I 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.

"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

Email and messages is the very few notifications I enabled on my phone. Reason is simple: I get very few of them, and most of them are either important, or if not, I appreciate knowing about it more than not knowing about it.

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.

People live different lives

> 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.

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).

The default setting is always king

A small lock on the browser, something as simple as the math problems some people use to stop their alarm in the morning might be a sufficient stopgap from mindless browser use.

I'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?

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.

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.

i've been using the blank spaces launcher for this. it has its flaws for sure, but the feature most useful for the scenario you describe is the "Lock Distractions" feature. In order to use safari, you have to go through a "mindfulness" exercise, and then you can unlock safari for a small amount of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, up to 20). I find this is just enough to keep me out of random wikipedia pages all day, but still allows me to pull up a webpage when i need to do some very specific task (like unsubscribe from an email list).

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...

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 vaguely remember someone here saying what worked for them was to add a fair amount of artificial lag to browsing, so that loading a page would actually be painfully slow.

I'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.

install the browser if you need it, uninstall it when youre done

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.

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.

One trick, even though it doesn't "lock it down" the same way, is to use a minimalist launcher. Check out OLauncher. It is a text-based launcher, it only has room for a few apps on the homepage, and it discourages fiddling with your phone.

https://github.com/tanujnotes/Olauncher?tab=readme-ov-file

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`

andoff[1] works well. I use it to lock down DNS settings to nextdns to block all the sites I want. Then I use lockmeout[2] to lock opening andoff to change the settings.

Also there is limitphone[3], but it has less settings and is easier to uninstall than andoff, but works via the same mechanism.

1: https://docs.andoff.one/ 2: https://www.teqtic.com/lock-me-out 3: https://limitphone.com/

https://github.com/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.

If you use iCloud, you should still be able to get back your contacts, photos, etc.

He mentions this, says it’s too easy to circumvent.