Still.

Ideas

Turn your iPhone into a dumb phone

You can buy a second phone with buttons and a tiny screen. Plenty of people do, and most of them drift back within a month, because the camera, the maps and the bank live on the old one. The other way is cheaper: keep your iPhone and take the noise out of it.

What actually changes

A dumb phone works because it shows you nothing. No icons pulling at you, no badges keeping count, no feed one thumb-slip away. You can rebuild that on an iPhone in about ten minutes: one widget that lists your essential apps as plain words, and an empty screen around it.

The camera, the maps, the two-factor codes and the bank all stay. What goes away is the part that made you open the phone for one thing and look up twenty minutes later.

9:41 AM
  • Phone
  • Messages
  • Camera
  • Maps
  • Notes
  • Spotify

The ten minute version

  1. Install Still and pick five to eight apps. Fewer is better, and you can change the list any time.
  2. Press and hold your home screen, tap Edit, then Add Widget, search for Still, and place the large widget.
  3. Drag every app icon off the first page. They all stay in the App Library, one swipe to the right.
  4. Set a plain black wallpaper. Still can save you one that matches its look.

One warning from experience: the setup is the easy part. Day three is the hard part, when your thumb still remembers where Instagram used to be. The empty screen is what retrains it. Nothing is blocked, and that is the point. An app you want on purpose is two taps away, and the habitual opens die off on their own, because there is nothing left to catch your eye.

Get Still for iPhone

$12.99, paid once. The first seven days have everything unlocked.

More ideas

Minimal iPhone home screen ideas · A text-only home screen