I used a dumbphone launcher for 7 days to see if it will decrease my time spent
January 16, 2026
Personal
Minimlist
Why did I do this?
I try to be a digital minimlist by waking up early and barely using my phone. The major problem is that no matter if I'm going to sleep or just waking up I always see myself on my phone. I can easily wake up early however, the challenge is avoiding my phone during these times. I've tried many solutions such as getting an app blocker to set schedules for when I wake up or sleep. The issue is that being able to see apps like Youtube, Twitter, Reddit makes me bypass this app blocker and go on them for hours. This is when I decided to try out a dumbphone launcher to see if it can really help this usuage of mine.
Before using a dumbphone launcher
Before applying a dumbphone launcher I tracked my hours spent. On average I used the phone for roughly 1 hour and 30 minutes. With this data I realized I use most of this time in the morning and night before I sleep. The major apps I used was Twitter and Chrome with Twitter being my most used app on my phone. With this in mine my goal was to decrease this time spent and see if a dumbphone launcher was really useful.
First few days using the launcher
The launcher I used was called "OLauncher" a free version and you only need to pay once to use features like widgets. I didn't have a problem this this launcher using it and I quite liked the presentation of it. What I liked most about this is being able to hide certain apps. There are popular launchers like "Minimlist Launcher" and "Niagra Launcher" that look much better however, you can't hide apps and searching them puts you in that cycle again. With this the only apps you can use are the ones you need that's the importance. From this I only really used it to listen to music, answer texts and sometimes searching stuff up. The major problem I had the first few days was that I was able to go on Youtube and Twitter on Chrome. With this I decided to block those website and continue with the launcher. The first few days felt nice and I was proud only seeing 30 minutes spent on my phone. With this I replaced scrolling on my phone at night with reading instead which turned out to be a good choice.
Dumbphone Launcher after one week
After using a dumbphone launcher for a full week I realized how much time I saved by not going on my phone. Replacing the habit with reading made a big change in my life. The reason this worked so well was because how boring my phone became. Without the easy acess to apps like Twitter and Reddit I rarely had the need to really use my phone. The only times I would ever use it was to listen to music or answer texts. The reason for my average to be at 30mins was because of my workout app I would use as everyday I would use it. So seeing distracting apps like Twitter, Reddit being replaced by productive apps made me feel the reason to post this blog. Documenting my change from using my phone so constantly made me continue using this and writing about it is only motivating more. I will continue using this launcher for a month and write about that in the future.