iPhone Dumbphone

Summary

I used Apple Configurator to turn my iPhone into a dumb phone. I can only access the apps and websites I want to use, and it’s feeling great! Compared to when I started I’m saving about 2 hours of screen time a day. If I kept this up for a month I promised to write a post about this setup. It’s now two months so here’s my post. What follows is a backstory, observations, and a how-to-guide. To get straight to the how-to-guide, click here. Motivation 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 what had me dreaming about the 2000s and old Nokia phones. But I couldn’t just go back to Nokia. My iPhone gave me Google Maps, Spotify, Uber and Waymo, Kindle and Audible, ChatGPT and Claude, Whatsapp, Wallet. There’s real utility to iPhones. If only access to utilities didn’t mean I’d also have access to social media. I often regretted my time on Twitter and Instagram. It would interrupt my flow states at work and detract from quality time with the people I loved. Even alone time suffered: instead of solitude I found myself checking for notifications. [1] Failed Attempts I tried and failed to fix this problem three times. Let me enumerate: I tried self-control but I found myself outmatched. On the surface the solution feels simple: why not just stop using distracting apps? For me using self-control here was like a hunter-gatherer using a club in open battle with a nuclear society. Social media companies spent centuries of human effort figuring out ways to get me to check my phone. If I wanted to win, I would need to use guerrilla methods. I tried Screen Time but it was too easy to ignore. Apple comes with Screen Time. You can set limits, but I found them useless. Once a limit runs out all you need to unlock your distracting app is to press a button. Do this a few times and you no longer notice the button. I tried switching p...