8 Ways To Make Your iPhone Harder To Use (On Purpose)

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to make your iPhone harder to use. 

I know some of you are asking why would you want to make your iPhone harder to use.  Well, if you find yourself using your iPhone too much, like browsing through social media apps or spending time staring at your screen while surrounded by people you know that you should be talking to, then you may want to make it harder for you to fall back to looking at your iPhone and doing things with it. It's a trend now to find creative ways to still keep the functionality of your iPhone there, but kind of encourage yourself to use it less.

I think one of the easiest ways to do this without really changing much on your iPhone is to simply make a harder passcode or set a password for your iPhone and take away face ID or touch ID entirely. So if you go into the settings app and you scroll down to Face ID & Passcode this is where you would change your passcode. But also where you can turn Off face ID. So if you've got it setup you can simply reset Face ID and just not use it. The same thing for Touch ID. Now you have to enter your passcode. But passcodes are often short and easy to enter. So you can change that by simply going down to Change Passcode. When you go to enter a new passcode instead of just using another six digits go to Passcode Options and here you can set a custom numeric code. So make it much longer than six digits. Or do a custom alphanumeric code. This means that instead of a numeric keypad coming up you get the full keyboard and you can use letters as well as numbers. So you can set a real password for your iPhone. This definitely adds a bit of a barrier to unlocking your phone and as a side effect your iPhone is actually a lot more secure as well. But you will certainly think twice before checking your social if you know you've got to enter in a long password just to unlock your phone. 

You can also lock some apps. So, for instance, you've got an app that you find that you are using too much, like this one. Tap and Hold it and one of the things that you can do is use Require Face ID, or if you have Face ID turned Off this would require your passcode. So even when your iPhone is unlocked you're going to have to enter that long password in again just to open this app. It doesn't make it impossible to get into the app, just makes it a little bit harder so maybe it will discourage you from using it anytime you want. 

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Now a more extreme measure that a lot of people use is to simply to delete apps. For instance, you can delete a social media app or a game just to make it pretty much impossible for use. But note that when you go to delete an app, like I'll go to delete this one, I'm given the option as to whether to remove it from the Home Screen or delete the app. Removing from the Home Screen means I have to access it from The App Library so it will be less tempting to use. Now remember when you delete an app it it still a purchased app in The App Store. So even if you paid for it or you have a subscription to it you can delete it and simply download it again later for free. You don't have to pay for it twice and if you have a subscription the subscription is still good. So you can say remove an app right now and then simply add it back in later. It's going to take a lot longer for you to redownload and reinstall the app so you'll be less likely to just use it in the moment. 

You also have another option. When you go into Settings and then go to iPhone Storage you'll see your apps here. You go into an app notice you can off-load an app. What this does is that it clears the app away so it saves space on your iPhone. But it still shows up on the Home screen. If you tap it, it downloads the app again keeping all the local data. So without changing your Home screen, really, you're simply causing a delay in being able to access the app again in addition to using some bandwidth. So you're probably not going to want to reload the app while you're on the go. 

Now another thing you can do is simply remove all of the apps from your Home screen. When you do you can still access them by going to the end here, to your App Library. This has all of your apps. If you're editing like this you can tap Edit here and you can edit Pages. Then you can turn off Pages like this. I'll turn off these two pages that have all the apps. I'll leave this one that just has a widget. Now this is my only Home Screen here. There is no access to apps. All the apps are here in the App Library and just a little bit harder to get to. You can leave the ones you're not so worried about down here in the Dock or add a few to the screen. 

Now, of course, a big tool Apple gives you for dealing with app addiction is Screen Time. Go into Settings and then go down to Screen Time and here you can setup limits on the use of your app. So you can setup App Limits here. You can add a limit and you can do it to whole categories of apps or specific apps and you can set how much you can use them the entire day. This can be a really powerful tool. If you set, say, a one hour limit not only does that mean that you can use that app or that set of apps for a hour in a day but even before you reach that limit you're probably going to be thinking very carefully about the time you spend in those apps. 

You can also use Downtime here to schedule time when only certain apps will be available to you. So you can say limit the time you use social media apps to the evening or a particular time in the morning during coffee. That kind of thing. 

Now also here in Settings a useful tool is Notifications. A lot of the time you're looking at your phone because you've got a notification. You can go into Notifications here and starting with some of the items here at the top, like Siri Suggestions and then for each individual app you can go in and turn off Notifications for that app. If you want to go really extreme turn off Notifications for every single app. So basically your iPhone isn't trying to get your attention at all. If you want to check your Mail or Messages or social media you have to go and do it yourself. You're not going to get an indicator telling you there is something to look at. But you can also do this using Focus here. Set a Focus Mode and schedule it and turn off Notifications for all or just some apps during that time. So you could allow All the notifications to come in in the evening but during the day only let Mail and Messages, say, come through. 

Now here's a really interesting technique that I know some people use. If you go into Settings and then Accessibility under Display and Display & Text Size you can go down and there are color filters. You can turn On Color Filters and set the filter to grayscale. The result is that you don't see any color on your iPhone. Everything. All your apps, everything you look at is going to be grayscale. So it doesn't take away any functionality but some people find that they are less addicted to their various apps when they don't see vivid colors on their iPhone anymore. You can always easily go in and turn off color filters and you can even set some of the accessibility shortcuts to allow you to do it easier than going into Settings. So you can turn it off, say, when you need to look at and edit photos or something but you can have grayscale on the rest of the time discouraging yourself from looking at all the pretty things on your phone. 

Here's one last one. Another Accessibility option. If you go all the way to the bottom of the Accessibility section you'll see Assistive Access. Here you can setup which apps will appear in Assistive Access. So just have your very minimum apps. Then you can turn this On. It takes a separate code here, so it is not your regular passcode. You set this up. Then it enables Assistive Access which then looks like this. So you end up with all these big chunky buttons and only for the apps that you specified. So it is definitely less appealing to use your iPhone and impossible, really, to get to the apps that aren't shown. Individual apps themselves also change how they work and they'll definitely be much less attractive for most users to use. To Exit this mode you just triple click the side button and there's a menu and you can exit using that special passcode. So it creates a barrier but doesn't make it impossible for you to get back to regular use. 

So those are some suggestions for ways that you can encourage yourself to use your iPhone less. Thanks for watching.