Turn Your Android into a Dumb-Phone

Sometimes the best solution is right under your nose.

2026-01-16

For all of my life I have oscillated between a full smartphone experience and having a dumb-phone. Sometimes due to cost, but mainly due to the considerable number of distractions that smart phones present. Constant access to 24/7 entertainment isn’t just a distraction; it’s a tax on mental health and the ability to sustain deep focus. Usually, people will bring up the discipline argument - “Just learn proper discipline”. I respect the simplicity of the argument, but it doesn’t really align with reality. The modern smartphone landscape is shaped by maliciously developed apps, designed partly by psychologists and A/B testing, to maximize the time you waste and their psychological grasp on your attention span. You don’t tell an alcoholic that purposefully avoiding a heavy-drinking party to simply “man up” and “show discipline” and they certainly wouldn’t want instant access to a bar in their pocket.

So what are your options if you wish to avoid the current hellscape smart phones represent? Well,

There are of course various solutions to these problems. You could use printed maps, physical tickets and even get something like an iPod. But these options can be very complicated and smartphones undoubtedly represent a very real value proposition. I tried looking at minimalist phones, but all of these had the same types of problems, namely that they never optimized for my specific locale. The range of apps is not just geographically dependent on for example your country’s digital infrastructure, but even your personal preferences. One person may find great value in music or podcasting apps, another might find them distracting and of negative value. I concluded that what was really needed was a way to lock down your smartphone on a personal level, allowing, or disallowing apps and website access depending on your personal preferences. I went as far as looking at so-called “Kosher Phones”, locked down smartphones utilized by Orthodox Jewish communities but these were expensive and not well suited to the use-case.

It was at this point that I realized that most phones of course already had such systems! My use-case was almost exactly identical to that of parental control of their children and the ecosystem for this is already pretty well-developed. I started experimenting along these lines but I had to make some compromises. Google’s parental controls are of course not supported by GrapheneOS, so I had to switch back to stock-android on my Pixel. Annoyingly, there was no way to access the parental controls outside of an app, so I had to have a second phone for this. I luckily had an old half-broken android phone lying around for this. It’s of course also very important to properly limit your notification options, but this is possible on any smartphone.

But it worked perfectly. I set up two accounts, one “parent” and one “child”. My main phone was the “child” and the phone at home was the “parent”. I could regulate what apps were allowed, what websites I could access, even the individual screen-time of each app. It was a bit of a hassle to set up but the results are undeniable. After a while you stop even thinking of your phone as a means of distracting yourself. Google has also later implemented the parental control to be compatible with the browser, so my laptop could function as the “adult”, rather than requiring a separate phone.

I’ve also recently been looking into more stream-lined solutions such as Brick, but they do not yet support white-listing websites for android, which is a non-starter for me. But I do look forward to solutions such as this making its way even to alternative smartphone operating systems such as GrapheneOS or Lineage, which would make them well worth my money.

In conclusion I want to express that there are options for limiting your smartphone dependence without limiting yourself to simply discipline. Of course a certain level of discipline is always necessary, I can’t reasonably put restrictions on my laptop or other main computing devices. However, locking down your smartphone can help, especially on the go. I wouldn’t say I miss any aspect of my smartphone being entirely unlocked, except for the possibility of GrapheneOS which lessens all the Google spying.

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