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Comment by marklar423 | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to do this too - paring down distracting apps, leaving only essentials like communication, maps, uber, etc. But my problem is what to do about the browser? I feel it's too essential to the "long tail" of uses (as the author put it), but also among the most distracting apps on my phone.

If anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them.

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Something I've recently played with is a very 'dumb' android browser [0] able only to open and share links (and refresh the webpage), nothing else. Since I don't trust myself that I won't just click links from page to page I also configured the webview's client to disable links [1]. From this, you may be able to restrict yourself as much as you can since you could set a whitelist set of links you find 'indispensable'.

[0] https://github.com/rickgram/NoBrowser

[1] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/webapp...

If on Android, you can propably use something like rethinkdns and just block the worst timewasting websites for a while. Once you get used to not accessing reddit, youtube, prawnhub, whatever your poison is, the browser becomes boring again.

What works for me, and this might not be palatable to everyone, is to intentionally downgrade my phone to a worse experience to add friction. I am currently using an SE 2020 on purpose. This thing overheats like hell, if I try to do anything too intensive with it it starts stuttering like crazy. But that's actually perfect, it's what I want. It naturally reduces my use time because it can get annoying to use.

One thing I sense the author is ignoring is the pretty LARGE swath of third party apps that do something of the like but in a much more user-friendly form factor. Most are targeted towards parents and teens, but surely there's no reason you basically couldn't use it on yourself. I'm thinking of things like Qustodio and the like. It should still allow you to massively restrict the iPhone, there's a little bit of friction involved with undoing it -- but not as insane as the entire iPhone reset -- and you can much more easily on the fly make custom changes to it as you go about it. I'd probably spring for something like that if I found screen time or self-control to be an issue before going full-in on something like configurator which I think would be very, very hard to iterate settings with.

I've been doing what the author did for about a year using Configurator. I have the browser blocked completely. I found that I could still get around it by sending messages to myself in apps like Messenger and using the built-in browser.

So I ended up using an allow list for internet traffic with nothing allowed, which stopped that. What do you find you need the browser for?

In the UK it has become very common to need to scan a QR code on your table to order at a restaurant, which takes you to a website.

Most certainly you can still order at the bar the old fashioned way, but since COVID, physical menus have been removed, so how is your group meant to decide what it wants to order before one of you goes up on its behalf? (You cannot all go up if you want to hold the table.)

I don't even particularly mind the experience of using the website; the interface enables the display of all ingredients & allows you to specify allergens they need to avoid. If the kitchen runs out of an item, they can mark it as unavailable in the webpage. Finally, fighting to order at a busy bar was never a fun experience to begin with (it is the norm in non-fine-dining experiences in the UK to not have your order taken at your table.) But, this does require you allow arbitrary internet access on your device, which complexifies the blocking situation.

Yes it's exactly the one-off situations like that, which aren't super often but occur enough to greatly inconvenience someone without a pocket browser.

That totally makes sense!

The pattern that finally seems to work for me is to use Freedom to block all scrolly crap specifically on mobile. If I want to dig through YouTube or look something up on Reddit that’s fine, but I have to physically go to a machine that’s not always in my pocket.

At least so far I don’t need any of the things I’ve blocked on the go.

I'm a real app minimalist, only basic stuff for day to day living, but the browser is what sucks my life away.

I've tried things like Leechblock, but they don't stick.

The only thing that's really worked is turning the damn thing off and sticking it in a drawer. I managed it for a week once. Hard to keep to though.

i've been using the blank spaces launcher for this. it has its flaws for sure, but the feature most useful for the scenario you describe is the "Lock Distractions" feature. In order to use safari, you have to go through a "mindfulness" exercise, and then you can unlock safari for a small amount of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, up to 20). I find this is just enough to keep me out of random wikipedia pages all day, but still allows me to pull up a webpage when i need to do some very specific task (like unsubscribe from an email list).

A small lock on the browser, something as simple as the math problems some people use to stop their alarm in the morning might be a sufficient stopgap from mindless browser use.

Needs to come back every five minutes or so.

I vaguely remember someone here saying what worked for them was to add a fair amount of artificial lag to browsing, so that loading a page would actually be painfully slow.

I find the mobile web is doing a great job of destroying the addictiveness of the browser. I use an se2 so not terribly old. new reddit doesn't really work at all on it. old reddit just barely. Most other websites seem to hang after trying to load all the adware and never return the full content anymore. Some mobile websites just flat out don't load at all anymore, just a white screen like the phone rolled over and gave up.

Hacker news is about the only website that works. But, once you find a couple threads you are interested in you are rate limited from replying before long and that frustration kicks me off it until days later potentially.

install the browser if you need it, uninstall it when youre done

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