Dumb Phone Prescription

How to read this

What this is

A dumb phone is a handset that does little more than calls and texts. Lately the thing people actually want is narrower than that. They want the same phone with a few apps out of reach. The tools for that already ship on the phone, under names like Digital Wellbeing, bedtime mode, focus mode, app timers, Screen Time, Downtime and colour filters.

The trouble is that the names and the menus move with every maker and every OS version, so nobody finds them. That is the only job this site has. Pick your device and OS version and you get the order to work through, with nothing to install and no permissions asked.

What it cannot do

This site cannot block other apps. A web page cannot see or touch anything outside the browser. It cannot read your app usage, change your home screen, or force the display to greyscale. Doing that needs accessibility access on Android or family controls on iOS, and those belong to installed apps, not to web pages.

There are no deep links into Settings either. Those addresses differ by maker, so on some phones the button does nothing, and a button that does nothing is a small lie. Instead each step carries the written path plus a word you can type into the Settings search box.

There is also no addiction test and no score. We are not qualified to judge that, and a number invites people to read it as a fact. Your phone already measures your hours, so look at its own dashboard.

Reading a step

Every step carries three things. The checked date is when we last compared the path, the OS version is the version it matches, and the source is the document that said so. No step here is missing any of the three.

Each step also says from the official document. That means we copied the maker's own support page rather than holding the handset ourselves. When a path gets checked on a real device, that one line changes. We are not hiding that all of them are documents for now.

Sources we use

What to do first

You do not have to do all of it at once. Start with the night. A scheduled bedtime mode or Downtime creates hours where reaching for the app simply does not open it. Greyscale comes next, because colour is what makes thumbnails pull at you, and it is the easiest change to undo if you hate it.

Then app timers. Setting ten minutes on day one usually ends with the timer switched off by day three. Half of what you currently spend tends to survive longer. Last comes the home screen, because opening the app after that needs a search, and that pause is the point.

Where people get stuck