This App Gives Your IPhone an Ultra-Minimalistic Home Screen
We all have that app on our home screen that we impulsively open and scroll through, even when we want to stop. You can try to deal with this problem by making the phone less attractive.
Android has minimalistic launchers such as 0Launcher , which display a list of text instead of icons. The idea is that you’ll only put the apps you need on your home screen, like text messages or maps. As I wrote last year for PCMag , using this launcher has really helped me think of my phone as a tool for a specific job, rather than a mindless way to waste my time.
I would love something like this for the iPhone, but unfortunately Apple doesn’t provide alternative launchers like Android does. Introducing Dumb Phone and an indie app from developer Michael Teagas. It gets around Apple’s limitations by offering a widget that can list the apps you use most often, and also offers instructions on how to integrate it with the rest of the system. It’s not an easy tweak, but it helps recreate the minimalist launcher I loved on Android.
Once you launch the app, you’ll be given a series of instructions to “minimize” the home screen. Basic idea: Add a widget to your desktop, change the wallpaper to black or white to match the widget, remove all other icons, and select the apps you want to display in the widget.
It takes some tweaking, but the result is a truly minimalistic home screen.
The widget comes in dark and light modes, as well as matching wallpapers, and you can orient the text as you wish. It is also possible to create multiple launchers that you can switch between. Anything that isn’t in one of your launchers can still be opened using iPhone’s Find feature, so you won’t lose access to less important apps.
Dumb Phone has a few drawbacks, mostly related to the limitations of iOS itself: when opening apps from the widget, the Dumb Phone app briefly opens first, which is a bit annoying, and only a pre-built list of apps is supported. (There are instructions on how to work around this issue using Apple Shortcuts, but this is also time-consuming.)
With that said, if you struggle with impulsive smartphone use, this app might be right for you. You can get started with the free version, which includes all the features; The paid version costs $2.99 per month, $9.99 per year, or $24.99 for life.