# **The best dumbphone is a limited smartphone.** If you want to lower your screen time, it can be tempting to go all-in — throw out your smartphone and get a brick phone with a keyboard. This path is usually temporary, overly limiting and even expensive. There are many times where you actually need apps. I think buying a new phone is unnecessary. All you need is a **thorough** blocking system. I have tried to decrease my screen time many times: 1. Apps that pause distracting apps for a few seconds after opening 2. Deleting distracting apps 3. Setting up app blockers The setup was always easy to bypass, and my screen time bounced back a few days later. However I have now found an Android setup that’s impossible to bypass, almost without limiting access to apps and features. # **The unbreakable setup** I’ve used the Android app StayFocused. I wish it was free, and someone please make a free version, the setup is very simple. The big thing in StayFocused is their strict mode and their app grouping feature, or what StayFocused calls profiles. When you create a profile, you can select as many apps as you want, and you are then able to make a “combined block”. I have all my distracting apps within a combined block. I can use those apps combined for 5 minutes, and then I can’t use any of them for 15 minutes. After those 15 minutes, the cycle resets and I can use the apps for another 5 minutes combined. I still have access to all the apps I could need, such as Instagram and LinkedIn, but I can only doom scroll or waste time for 5 minutes. It’s rare that I need any of these apps for more than 5 minutes, in which case I wait for 15 minutes and finish what I had to do — or just use my laptop. An annoying part of Android is I also have to block non-distracting apps. I have 40+ apps blocked, many of which are ‘productive’ apps like Messenger and Notion. The problem is in-app browsers. If you send [youtube.com](http://youtube.com) as a message on Messenger, and you click the link that pops up, then it won’t open the YouTube app, and also won’t open [youtube.com](http://youtube.com) in your browser (both apps being part of my combined block). It will create a browser **within** Messenger, in which YouTube is opened. From there, you can open any website without being blocked. In about 1/3 of apps, if you navigate to the settings, or about section, and click ‘Privacy Policy’, then the Privacy Policy will open in an in-app browser. From the privacy policy, you can almost always find a link to their website, and then to their socials, whereafter you are watching YouTube or Instagram without being blocked. Apps like Notion have the ability to embed YouTube videos, which you can watch without being blocked. The only solution I have for these apps, is to add them to my combined block (where I can only use them for 5 minutes every 15 minutes). On top of that, any new apps I install are automatically added to my combined block. Time limiting productive apps can be annoying, but over the past few months it has cost me, at most, an hour. Last thing, if you go fullscreen on a video and close your browser, it will open picture-in-picture, which lets you bypass the blocks. You can disable picture-in-picture in your settings. This should block you from basically any distractions on your phone. Next, we also don’t want the ability to turn off these blocks or settings, which is why I use strict mode, available in StayFocused. Strict mode gets admin access to your phone and blocks you from: - Accessing most of your settings — now you can’t disable the app, or turn picture-in-picture back on. - Uninstalling apps, including StayFocused. - Removing blocks in StayFocused, you can only make more restrictions during strict mode. I have my strict mode on a schedule from 17 to 16:45 every day, giving me a 15-minute gap from 16:45–17 where I can turn off strict mode and make any necessary edits. Remember to turn it back on immediately after doing edits!! This means that from 17 until 16:45 the next day, my blockers are unbreakable, and it is impossible for me to get distracted on my phone. # TL;DR How to make your Android a dumbphone 1. Download StayFocused and get premium 2. Create a combined block 3. Add all distracting apps to the combined block 4. Add all the apps that have in-app browsers to the combined block 5. Disable picture-in-picture in settings 6. Turn on strict mode and schedule it to give you a very limited timeframe to turn it off I hope this can give you dumbphone benefits, without sacrificing the apps and features that are useful. Let me know if you find any holes or better apps to do this with, I’ll keep this updated. UPDATE: I found a way to bypass the blocks 🫠 If you swipe up from the bottom and hold, you get the screen where you can switch to other recent apps. Videos will still run but the timer stops counting down. You can scroll, swipe up, watch a video and repeat to doom scroll. Reach out if you want to build an app that is free and actually works, I would be down to help. I've also thought of running an open source image model locally that is screenshotting and checking constantly if you are using your phone productively and locking you out if you are doom scrolling, gaming or wasting time. (Maybe even a desktop app as well)