iPhone dumbphone
22 points by adampetrovic
22 points by adampetrovic
I’m not the author of the post, but I submitted it because I’ve been using almost exactly this approach for the last six months, and it has been the most effective thing I’ve tried for reducing phone distraction.
I’ve probably tried ten or so variants of this over the years: Screen Time limits, deleting apps, blocking apps, grayscale, separate devices, various “dumbphone” experiments, etc. Most of them either had too little friction, so I worked around them, or too much friction, so I eventually abandoned them.
Apple Configurator has hit a surprisingly good middle ground. My phone is still useful, but no longer feels like an infinite slot machine. I keep the App Store unavailable day to day, and sure the friction of plugging my phone in to my laptop and removing the profile isn't that great, its large enough that I can repel it without reverting back to old habits.
This sort of thing never ended up working for me because I always just accessed everything via the web browser. Brick has been very helpful though
With the approach described in the post you can have an allow-list of websites and everything else will be blocked
Yeah, but having the whole internet is really useful, but only really when I'm at home and need to look up something random like a manual or a recipe, so having the ability to temporarily unbrick my phone only at home is much more convenient