I’ve been thinking about the idea of a ‘dumb phone’ recently. This is the idea that phones, since they became so smart, are actually hindering our daily lives and possibly even more than they help. Of course, there’s a lot to love about smart phones – maps, browsing, video calling, calendars, music, etc. But there is also a lot of potential to get sucked in to the endless scroll of social media, forums, YouTube, games, and so on. The idea of a ‘dumb phone’ is to go back to how phones used to be – something you can call and text on, and maybe one or two other features.

Of course, I’m not the only person to have had this thought. That’s why there’s already a few apps you can get which set up your phone to be dumb (unfortunately, I cannot speak much on the Android side of things, so you’ll have to deal with my Apple-focused post today). I had a few problems with these existing apps – they were often expensive or subscription based, which is really bad when a real dumb phone is pretty inexpensive. Two, they work better on some phones than others. For example, there’s a few apps that will display the name of a particular app which you can tap on to open it, and it is sorted like a list. This works great on newer iPhones with the always-on displays, but not so great on older models (though not a major problem, but they are limited in what they can do due to Apple’s ecosystem). And then there’s the question of turning your phone back to a smart one so you can do those other things when you want to.

Fortunately, there was already an inbuilt solution for this – it’s called “Assistive Access” in iOS, and you can find it in the accessibility options. This is an accessibility feature designed to make the iPhone way simpler; gone are multiple screens and the potential to get lost. Instead, you pre-select a group of apps and, once activated, these are displayed in a list on your phone. Tapping on an app opens it, but the screen is reduced to accomodate a ginormous ‘back’ button at the bottom (where the home button would have been on older iPhones). You can only message people you have pre-added, and in general the whole phone feels a lot less pleasant to use (but certainly a lot easier). You can also set a triple click of the power button to turn on this mode automatically.

This is the dumb phone feature I’ve been looking for – it’s easy to turn on and off, and it doesn’t require any extra purchases to use. You can also use any app with it – my gym uses an app to access it, and it works fine in this mode. To make my phone dumb, I removed most apps that are superfluous or I find myself wasting lots of time on. I also didn’t include Safari, because I am the sort of person to get lost down rabbit holes. Instead, I am now forcing myself to open up something actually useful if I want to use it. I turn it on first thing on a work morning, so I can’t get distracted before journalling and throughout the day. I can then turn it off once I finish the workday, or if I really do need the normal functionality.

There’s a few issues I’ve found with it. Only being able to respond to pre-approved people in iMessage is very annoying, and I would have liked a feature to override that. When keeping the screen on for a long period of time (such as for a pomodoro counter), it will start flickering for some reason, bouncing on and off, which is bizarre and attention sucking. I also found notifications to be a bit strange with it – what I think is happening is that, although it follows your normal notification schedule, such as night time notifications off, if people choose to notify me during that time I won’t get the notification. But restricting it to just using it during the day is not a big problem to get around this. Do note that this method does mean you give up widgets and the ability to easily change these notification settings – so if you need something like that, you’d best keep your phone on the normal setting.

What do you think of the dumb phone trend? Is this something you can see yourself trying? Let me know in the comments below.