Esteban Cairol

If you’re looking to reduce screen time and distractions, you might want to take a look at this app.

It is called minimalist phone, and the premise is that by removing all the theme/icon colors from your phone, you can re-learn to use your phone only when you need it and avoid all those colorful noisy triggers that make you crave for dopamine.

It makes your phone look like this:

Boring. But cool.

I’ve been using it for a week, and some of the things that I like:

• Very neat design.
• You can pick a list of your favorite apps and even re-name them.
• When you open a social media app, it forces you to choose how much time you want to use it: 1 min, 5 min, 15 min max.
• I end my day with 70% battery or so, big plus.

Some of the stuff I don’t like that much:

• Since there are no icons, I have to memorize the name of all the apps. This should be easy most of the time, but I was surprised how many seconds it took me to remember the name of my bank app.
• I haven’t found a way to enable notifications if someone calls.

Also, it only works on Android. This makes sense because the app sits on top of everything else and has a lot of permission access over your phone.

But if you have an Android, I suggest to give it a try.