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I can’t get anything done if I have a phone exploding with random crap notifications all day long. It needs to go.

I’m in pretty good company – a ton of people from Telegram’s Durov to Warren Buffet at his peak to Jack Dorsey and even Zuckerberg, the Mr. Stuff-Your-Face-With-Reels-Until-You-Puke 🤮 himself have all at some point mentioned minimizing one’s exposure to the attention-destroying device to reclaim some focus time and get some work done.

Round 1.

After looking around a bunch, and trying an actual ugly, expensive and useless brand new 4G flip phone from T-Mobile, I came across a few modern kickstarter-style attempts to produce a proper distraction free device. I ended up getting one of the “modern dumbphones” – Light Phone III. (no affiliation, not an ad)

Long story short, it’s a great device, with 5G and a whole philosophy of design, which is very nicely crafted. I think it’s a very monumental endeavor to design a phone from scratch. Unfortunately, despite what looks like a lot of labor of love, it still fell short of the good ol’ Samsung which has iterated on their devices for close to 2 decades now, covering an infinite number of usability edge cases during all that time, as well as creating a relatively indestructible device from a physical standpoint.

A few totally subjective, personal gripes with the otherwise excellent Light Phone III that made me rethink that approach:

• The screen and the body scratch very easily, I delayed getting a case and a screen protector and paid for that dearly by having deep scratches all over just from carrying it around for the first two weeks, something that I haven’t seen in newer Galaxies.
• The built-in 5G Wifi hotspot, which I still need to tether my laptop for work emergencies on the go, seems to turn itself off after a very short time. Probably was added as a nice battery saving feature, but very annoying. Samsung has an easy setting to change the hotspot timeout to whatever you like.
• I do miss a familiar UI, getting used to a totally different UI paradigm in Light Phone III took some effort.
• Most importantly though, there were a few apps that I really really missed. For example, I listen to a lot of Soundcloud mixes as background music for work or while commuting. Having Slack (strictly the work account) and Google’s calendar would be nice, although not critical. All in all, it would be just nice to pick and choose which apps to keep instead of getting a fixed set handed to you. All of us have different preferences, so it seemed rather futile to try to satisfy everyone’s different definitions of “minimalism” with one fixed set of basic Light Phone apps.

After a few weeks, the Light Phone III was regrettably shelved and the journey to find the perfect dumbphone was re-embarked upon.

Round 2.

Apple devices, of course, did not enter the picture for one second – in my teenage years, Bill Gates was widely considered evil personified for controlling the OS, whereas with the iPhone, Apple proudly controls *ALL* your hardware, your OS, and all your software, dictating to you which apps you are allowed and not allowed to install on your phone, taking a 30% cut from developers that managed to pass the app censorship, while outright banning others at the slightest whim. As a result of this steel grip dictatorship, there are a handful of apps that I actually need that are not even available on said devices.

Then I noticed I had an older Galaxy laying around in the room. What if:

• I removed Google Play from that phone with adb
• Remove ALL the garbage apps too, all the way up to Google Chrome (why not?), and of course, “Samsung Internet”, which is normally the first thing I disable.
  • Spoiler: even after a factory reset, the device turned out to have HUNDREDS of garbage apps, including the secretly bundled Facebook and Instagram which I never asked for.
• Leave just the apps that I need like the actual phone, Maps, Soundcloud, work Slack, whatever
• Effectively locking it down so any new app would have to go over the adb route, which is annoying enough for me to rarely venture there.
• I can still keep a newer smartphone phone around with all the crap apps cheerfully intact to enjoy some pointless time killing at home, should I ever feel like it.

A month into it, I’m happy to report that this plan so far has worked. I leave the newer device full of bloatware at home, and during the day manage everything life throws at me with a stripped down, locked down older Galaxy that has maybe a dozen apps that I personally handpicked, including my own APK that adds some custom settings to my phone that I like.

I have no urges to reinstall Google Play, the browsers, the socials, or any of the other ~300 apps (and libraries) that were lurking on my phone after a factory reset that I removed one by one. At some point, I *might* splurge on adding some banking apps via adb, but I’ve been feeling pretty lazy about messing with that tool again, so the older Galaxy is still locked down without Google Play, and the plan continues to work.

How:

• Connect to an Android device with adb and: adb shell pm list packages
  • my Galaxy had 446 apps on it after a factory reset (that’s considered clean slate!), out of which i removed at least 200

• Take this list of packages, paste it into your favorite AI robot brain and tell it to narrow the list down to the garbage apps that can be safely removed
  • personally, I consider many things like browsers useless during the day too, but whatever floats your boat
• adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.facebook.katana for the win!