Marv's Blog

How I Cut Down on Smartphone Screentime

Published: January 6, 2026

Sometimes life can be a lot and I often feel how important it is to have a way to escape. I'm about to finish my degree in Digital Humanities, have job, some other side gigs and a kid and a partner. More often than not things stack up and it can take weeks before I get to work on my projects, make music or build something.

It's hard to really dive into something if there's not much time. As my energy drains, the threshold gets bigger and bigger and I'm less likely to pick up a drum machine or work on that thing I've been programming.

A smartphone, on the other hand, delivers in an instant. Effortless to grab it from your pocket and unlock. It doesn't take long to spot the app that your brain wants the most. Probably because it has the most colorful icon or because a red badge popped up, telling you that you might have missed something important.

Over time, it became a habit for me to just grab my phone when nothing was going on or when I had to wait for something. That habit became so all-encompassing and overwhelming that I wanted it to stop. So I looked for solutions.

I started in August 2025 and now it's January 2026. I'm really glad that the phone is not the first thing I grab when I'm bored and I want to share what worked for me.

Here are some of the app that I used on my iPhone that swallowed a lot of my time:

  • Safari (way too easy to browse the web)
  • Instagram (never ending feed)
  • eBay (too many interesting things to buy)
  • Telegram (group chats)
  • Discord (very fast chat rooms and many of them)

This smartphone thing had to stop. So some time in June 2025, I started watching many YouTube videos about digital minimalism. This is mainly about the intentional and mindful use of technology, not necessarily about minimizing overall usage.

So with smartphones, the goal is to minimize random usage, make it look boring and make it easy to access essentials like messages and phone. This is done by toning down its colors, removing apps from the home screen and uninstalling apps that you'd use too often. This way you're supposed to use your phone only if you really need to.

I tried this with my iPhone:

  • uninstall as many apps as possible
  • make all icons grayscale
  • remove most things from the home screen (except for maps, phone, messenger, etc.)

And still, I'd reach for my phone, just pull up the search bar and open up Safari. If I blocked a website I visited too often, I'd just find another one to browse through.

I think customizing your iPhone (or any regular smartphone) only works if you are disciplined. This, I found out, I'm really not.
Removed apps were reinstalled, blocked content was unblocked and time limits were circumvented.

Friction was what I needed. iPhones are really designed to be as frictionless as possible, so much so that any customizations you made can be reverted in a pinch.

So I had to give up the iPhone and that was something I was actually happy about. I used to carry around an iPhone 12 Pro. The screen is too large (you can't reach across the screen with your thumb) and it doesn't have a headphone jack (I main wired Koss headphones) and there is no easy way to install cool software, either (I need a good podcast and YouTube client). Good riddance!

So if friction is what I needed, I'd have to find a phone that comes with annoying hurdles that can't just be removed or uninstalled. It didn’t take me very long to find the most annoying phone. After sleeping on it overnight, I ordered it. Since August 24, 2026, I’ve been the proud owner of a Unihertz Jelly Star.

This phone is a tiny and translucent jelly bean that happily accepts your wired headphones and takes photos like it's 2010. It runs Android and it's recent enough to run all the apps that are essential for me: Signal (messenger), maps and apps for public transport (tickets) and the DuckDuckGo browser (forgets everything after you close it).

I love this phone. It doesn't invite you to browse the internet. You can definitely look something up if you're stuck somewhere but you'll take quite a bit longer to type it out. Instead, when I'm on public transport, I just put on a podcast or listen to some music. That's something I didn't do as often since I could never ever find those annoying lightning to headphone adapters.

You're not tempted to chat too much, either. You can respond to urgent texts but you'd rather wait until you can use the computer to really dedicate some time to chatting with your friends.

I'm really happy to say that my screen time went down from often more than 4 hours per day to an average of just 20 minutes.

Apps that I use now when I actually need them:

  • Signal
  • Öffi (public transport)
  • Public transport app of my city (ticket for public transport)
  • AntennaPod

My personal recipe for cutting down on screentime is:

  1. Get the most annoying (yet functional) phone you can find
  2. Enjoy life away from your phone

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