How to make your Android an unbreakable dumbphone without losing any functionality

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.

Going this way is usually temporary, overly limiting and even expensive.

There are many times where you actually need your apps, and buying a new phone is unnecessary. All you need is a thorough blocking system.

I used to spend ~4 hours a day on my phone. I now spend ~30 minutes a day.

I have tried to decrease my screen time many times:

1. Using apps that pause distracting apps for a few seconds when you open them
2. Deleting distracting apps
3. Setting up app blockers

No matter what I did, the setup was easy to bypass, and my screen time bounced back to ~4 hours after a few days.

But a few months ago, I found a setup that’s impossible to bypass, without limiting my phones functionality

Here’s how it works.

The unbreakable and unlimiting setup

I’ve used the Android app StayFocused. I wish it was free, and I beg any app developer to make a free version, as the capabilities are 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. Here, 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.

This setup works wonders. I still have access to all the apps I could need, such as Instagram and LinkedIn, but doom scrolling is impossible.

And it’s rare that I need any of these apps for more than 5 minutes, in which case I can wait for 15 minutes and finish whatever I had to do — or just use my laptop.

Now, I don’t just block distracting apps. I have 40+ apps blocked, many of which are ‘productive’ apps like Messenger and Notion.

The reason for this is in-app browsers. If you send 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 in your browser (both apps being part of my combined block). No, it will create a browser within Messenger, in which YouTube is opened. From there, you can open any website without being blocked.

This is not just Messenger. 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 the company website, and then to their socials, whereafter you are watching YouTube or Instagram without being blocked.

And apps like Notion have the ability to embed YouTube videos, which you can then watch within Notion without being blocked.

The only solution I have for these apps, is to add them to my combined block of 15 minutes wait for 5 minutes of combined usage.

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 — and this setup saves me hours every day.

Finally, if you go fullscreen on a video and close your browser, it will open picture-in-picture, which allows you to bypass the blocks. You can disable picture-in-picture in your settings.

This should block you from basically any distractions on your phone.

Now, 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. I always 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.

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 the dumbphone benefits, without having to sacrifice the many apps and features that are actually useful.

Let me know if you find any holes or better apps to do this with, I’ll keep this updated.