{"id":89,"date":"2024-05-26T10:56:16","date_gmt":"2024-05-26T10:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2024-05-26T10:56:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-26T10:56:16","slug":"iphones-assistive-access-as-a-dumb-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"iPhone’s ‘Assistive Access’ as a Dumb Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[137,135,134,110,31,136],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-accessibility","tag-dumb-phone","tag-ios","tag-iphone","tag-productivity","tag-smart-phone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinsoncomposer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}