Converting my Smartphone into a Dumphone

[2Square]

Hello everyone,
I found the Reject Convenience channel yesterday and have fallen into the rabbit hole. I just watched “I Switched to a Dumb Phone – 2-year check-in” video and decided to check out the forum as well. I am in the middle of my own journey finding a healthy relationship with my phone and wanted to share the steps I took to turn my smartphone into a dumb phone. All of this is on a Samsung S22

1) Grayscale
Setting your phone to grayscale is probably the most suggested solution to screen time. For good reason too, it helps. There is still a lot of self-control needed to stop from turning it off when scrolling through feeds or in general use. Not being able to see the vibrant colors attracting the user to the app is a good first step to reducing the call of the phone. Tip: make it hard to turn off screen time. Samsung let’s you add it to your navigation bar and that is what I had for awhile but I found I turned grayscale off before scrolling social media which defeats the purpose of having it on.

2) Time Limits
Setting time limits on addicting or time-wasting apps is a good way to make sure you are limiting you phone usage. I have an overall screen usage goal of at max 1 hour a day and keep track of how I do each day in a notebook. I don’t always meet this goal and have weeks where I seem to forget I am limiting my usage at all, but it does help having a goal. I use the built in app timer features for my phone but that is because 1) I don’t want a 3rd party app reading my screen 24/7 and 2) the apps I did try did not track my app usage time consistently.

3) Get rid of all those apps!
Getting rid of apps is the hardest step. I went from around 120 apps to 67 (over half of which are forced installed thanks to Samsung). If I need to use an app, I download it and use it only for what was called for in that instance, and the second I am done with that task, I uninstall it. This keeps the distractions my phone can offer limited. I uninstalled all my social media apps and access those accounts through my browser if I want to. Rejecting convenience is one of the best ways to keep from mindless usage.

4) Get rid of those app icons!
This is the biggest and most effective way I have limited my phone addiction. I do not have a single app icon on my home screen. I downloaded a launcher called AIO Launcher (I recommended the launcher but have not investigated any data collection practices, take my recommendation as a user experience only) and turned my home screen into nothing but the 4 non-social media apps I use most often all in text form. My app library is a list of text rather than folders of icons. Now if I want to use something other than my main apps, I have to search for it specifically instead of its icon catching my attention.

I attached two screenshots of my homepage to show what I mean

These are the most impactful steps I have taken to reducing my phone addiction, other steps such as decentralizing the actions I take on my phone, i.e. getting rid of Spotify and using Tidal and Pocket Casts separately instead of both my music and podcasts on the same app, and blocking all but important notifications have helped a lot as well. Let me know if anyone has started a similar journey and how similar or different the steps you took are compared to mine.

2Square

[rejectconvenience]

I love how thoughtful this is all presented!! It's super helpful to see how other folks handle things to help inspire yourself! Thank you so much for sharing. I think switching what you already have is a fantastic way to handle things! ALSO @2Square welcome to the forum, it's pretty cool here, enjoy the frog pics!

[rebecca]

This is the route I chose, too, but the iPhone equivalent. I’ve been toying with the dumbphone idea for years but at the times I may have pulled the trigger I was thwarted by the total lack of options in Canada. Punkt became available in Canada recently, and there is a flip phone available everywhere, but as I was pricing things out I realized that I have paid for, and already own, a perfectly functional device. I didn’t want to spend the extra money. I had already decentralized my iPhone… I own cameras, which was what I really used it for most, take my notes in notebooks, have an mp3 player, and had already deleted almost all of my apps. I turned off most of my notifications years ago.

I was also thinking about something that came up in the dumbphone update video which was the expectation that you have a smartphone. I bought a house recently and never even met my lawers, it was all done online. Including my identity verification which could only be done through an app on my phone. My baby’s nanny cam doesn’t even come with a viewer, the phone is the expected viewer. For a time I dedicated an old ipad to that function but it just made things needlessly complicated. It’s easier to have it on my phone. I live a life where I get a lot of phone calls and can’t really afford to miss them so I do have it with me all the time even if I don’t use it that much.

Anyway, I also found this kind of dumbification super helpful in reducing time spent on my phone and also how I use it. My pickup metric is so low compared to what it was before. I respect the dumbphone but this option was the right move for me right now.

[Crazyroostereye]

I use the Pro Launcher, the paid version of OLauncher, which I found exactly fits my needs. I was able to get rid of Social Media Apps fairly easily, except YouTube, as I didn't use many in the first place. But one thing I did consistently was just scroll through my Apps that I used as a Time waster.

Which made me look into Minimalism Apps. And Pro Launcher looked as the best solution for me. They're quick and easy setup was perfect and my Phone, how my work college put it, was made into a Message and Ping/Notification Device. (I have a lot of Admin things which need me to be Pinged when stuff go wrong)