You can turn your iPhone into a distraction-free dumbphone — here's how in 5 steps

1. Clear your home screen down to basics

Visual clutter creates temptation. A home screen packed with app icons invites exploration and distracted tapping. Minimizing what's visible reduces impulse opens significantly.

Limit your home screen to four apps maximum: Phone, Messages, Camera, and Maps. Move everything else into the App Library where they're searchable but not immediately visible.

Removing apps from your home screen doesn't delete them. Long-press any icon, select Remove App, then choose Remove from Home Screen instead of Delete App. The app remains installed but requires intentional searching to access.

This creates helpful friction. Opening your email or a specific work app still takes seconds, but you have to actively search for it rather than tap reflexively.

2. Eliminate notifications

Notifications exist to pull you back into your phone constantly. Every ping, banner, and badge demands attention and breaks focus, even when the underlying message is completely unimportant.

Go through your notifications settings and disable alerts for everything except phone calls, messages from people you actually know, and perhaps your calendar. Email doesn't need notifications, you can check it on your schedule. Work apps don't need notifications, emergencies come through calls. And news apps definitely don't need notifications.

For Messages specifically, go to Settings, Messages, Notifications and set previews to show only when unlocked. This stops your lock screen from becoming a scrollable feed of conversations that pull you in every time you glance at your phone.

Be aggressive here. Most things presented as urgent aren't. Notifications create false urgency to drive engagement. Turning them off returns control over your attention to you instead of algorithms optimizing for maximum interruption.

3. Delete social media apps completely

Remove Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and any other social platform from your iPhone. Don't just move them to a folder or turn off notifications — actually uninstall them.

The apps are engineered for maximum engagement. Even with the best intentions, opening one to answer a direct message leads to checking your feed, which leads to watching stories, which somehow consumes half an hour you didn't mean to spend.

You're not abandoning these platforms. You're restricting access to your computer, where using them feels less seamless and more deliberate. Desktop versions load slower, interfaces feel clunkier, and the whole experience creates natural stopping points that mobile apps deliberately eliminate.

4. Disable Safari to close the obvious loophole

Removing social apps fails if Safari remains available. Mobile web browsers let you access Instagram, Facebook, and everything else you just deleted, defeating the entire purpose.

Disable Safari completely. Open Settings, navigate to Screen Time, then Content & Privacy Restrictions, then Allowed Apps. Toggle Safari off. The browser disappears from your phone entirely unless you manually reverse this.

Yes, this breaks links in emails and messages. Yes, it prevents spontaneous web searches. That's intentional. Those "quick searches" rarely stay quick, and clicked links often lead to rabbit holes that eat significant time.

Your essential functions remain intact: phone calls work, messaging works, camera works, maps work. Web access moves to your computer, where it belongs for anything requiring real attention or research.

If completely blocking Safari creates genuine work problems, leave it enabled but assign a strict one or two-minute daily limit through Screen Time.

5. Enable grayscale permanently

Similar to notifications, color drives engagement. Bright reds on notification badges signal urgency. Blue highlights draw your eye. Vibrant app icons look appealing and worth tapping. Grayscale eliminates all of that psychological manipulation.

Navigate to Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text Size, then Color Filters. Turn on Color Filters and select Grayscale. Your screen immediately shifts to black, white, and shades of gray.

The transformation is dramatic. Apps that felt important and engaging suddenly look dull and uninviting. Social feeds become boring to scroll. Everything feels flatter and less worthy of your attention, which is exactly the goal.

Also enable Reduce Motion under Settings, Accessibility, Motion, and toggling on Reduce Motion. This strips out interface animations that make your phone feel lively and engaging, replacing them with plain transitions that feel purely functional.