I Hacked iPhone’s “Do Not Disturb While Driving” Function and Improved My Life

I don't get this. If I don't want to be disturbed I just turn the phone to silent, although more often than not I don't need to because the phone will generally be in a different room than I am. If someone wants a reply from me they'll call me and hope the phone is with me, which doesn't happen for several hours a day.

Articles like this one make me feel old for not being with my phone 24/7 because they imply that that's what the norm is.

Is this what life is really like for most people? Are you all riding a firehose of incoming texts that need attention?

Looking over the Messages app on my iPhone, it’s basically just:

* stuff from my wife

* iMessage group chat with my wife and daughter

* “your cell phone bill is ready to view”

* one friend who always has hilarious memes on tap

* “here’s your temporary password for some random WiFi network”

* “your dumplings order is ready to be picked up!”

* “you’re eligible for a reward at the crepe place!”

* political spam that was addressed to someone else

* “it’s time to schedule your next dental appointment!”

* “your Uber code is ...”

* “reminder: your child’s annual physical is coming up on ...”

* “you’ve logged into your Aeroflot account from ...”

I’ve scrolled as far back as January while typing out this comment. Note that I don’t delete texts for the same reason I don’t delete email: “what if I need to go back to it later?” is commonly a guiding principle for me.

There’s no barrage of texts from anyone who isn’t an automated system already, and those can certainly wait. My email looks quite similar, and has become so full of automatons that I only open my inbox rarely in order to find a specific message, such as an email address verification ping.

How I wish iOS would allow you to mark text messages as “unread” or “flagged”. Messages come in, I read them to see if they’re urgent, most often they are not, however, I usually do want to reply later. But, I feel an obligation to reply right away, otherwise the message will get lost in the mix of other read messages and forgotten.

> anyone who texts me will get an automatic reply saying that I’m off my phone and I’ll get back to them when I’ve reconnected

If people messaging you can't wait 1h for the answer I don't see the problem being with phones, it's with people

I'll get to messages when I'm ready to answer them, which might be in 1 min but it also might be 1h or more

This is not a "hack." This is using the phone as designed.

I'm pretty bad with a lot of this stuff, I've a fairly nuts schedule of blocks on Freedom to keep me off certain sites for 22 hours a day. The issue is never so much the notifications for me as the awareness that going onto whatever services is an option so the approach in this article probably wouldn't work for me.

As an example of how bad I am, I'm thinking of buying a timed lock and making some form of USB device to input my password for my computer so I can just lock it away with my smartphone and be totally offline for patches.

The automated reply thing in this article sounds like a nuisance to me though. If someone gets a do not disturb message when they message me now, if they message in an hour and don't get another one then they presumably know I'm free and choosing to not answer?

click bait title, linking to a pseudo self-help cult.

HN is getting too weird for me.

I'm sure you could apply this to any mobile device that can run If This Then That - https://ifttt.com/

Or just go under the radar and disable all notifications for all apps and also disable vibration or any other notification signal.