I’ve been trying something a bit new with my phone since yesterday.

What am I looking at?

This is a launcher for Android called Olauncher and I’m trying it out to see if it can help me cut down on mindless phone usage.

Olauncher replaces the built-in Android home screen with a simple list of 0-8 apps of your choosing. There are no icons, no folders, no widgets. There are wallpapers, but as you can see I’ve gotten rid of that as well. Swiping up summons a list of all your apps along with the keyboard for search.

Olauncher seems to be the common ancestor for a whole family of launchers. These launchers all share similar design and functionality and are pretty easy to come by if you search F-droid. If you like the simple list design then it’s worth taking a look at a few. One that I really like is YAM Launcher because of its extra options.

Why?

Up until recently I’ve just been using the default Pixel launcher. It’s simple and it works, but I’ve been getting the feeling that I’m too comfortable with the muscle memory of launching apps. I had everything laid out such that it was easy to impulsively open just about anything I wanted in about a second or less. Sure, I could have modified my app layout to try to prevent that, but isn’t it more fun to try something that’s purposefully designed for minimalism instead?

I got the idea after recently watching the video “Are minimal phones a scam?” by Becca Farsace. There’s a bunch of cool looking minimal phones out there, the problem to me is that I already have a phone and all the minimal phones sort of seem like expensive toys more than anything else. Distractions are a software problem anyway, and I like Becca’s suggestion of switching to a simple launcher like Olauncher to turn what you already have into a minimal phone.

So far the plan seems to be working. My main screen only has the apps which I may genuinely need to quickly access and aren’t likely to be distracting. Having to search for all my other apps is already making it so I only open them when I actually have the conscious thought to check them, which isn’t as often as I thought!

This is only scratching the surface

There’s a lot more that I’m sure is possible here, but for me this is a good start for now. I’ve already heard from a few others who shared their setups after I first shared mine on Mastodon, but if you’ve got an interesting phone setup too then I’d love hearing about it.

— JP