minimalist dumb phone - dialed

How many apps do you really need?

Your phone should be a tool. Most of the time it's a slot machine.

dialed is a minimalist launcher that replaces your home screen with plain text. No icons, no badges, no colour pulling at the corner of your eye. Just the handful of things you actually opened on purpose.

It's intentionally boring. That's the point.

A HOME SCREEN THAT SHUTS UP
Text-only, high contrast, nothing animated. A distraction-free home screen that turns your smartphone into a dumb phone without buying one.

THE FOCUS GATE
Pick the apps that eat your evenings. When you open one, dialed pauses and asks why — boredom, habit, or necessity — while a short timer runs. You can still go in. You just have to mean it.

This is built on the delay-and-reflect idea from a 2023 PNAS study, which found a 57% drop in target-app opens. That trial tested a different app, one sec, not dialed.

SWIPE, DON'T HUNT
Gesture navigation and instant app search. Get in, get the thing, get out.

SCREEN TIME WITHOUT THE GUILT TRIP
A quiet screen time indicator on the home screen. You see the number. No badges, no weekly shame report.

HIDE WHAT YOU DON'T WANT SEEN
Move apps into a separate hidden app drawer. Rename them too — Instagram can be "no" if that helps.

JUST ENOUGH WIDGETS
Weather, calendar, music, maps, habits, gym. Glanceable, then gone.

GYM TRACKING THAT ISN'T A WHOLE APP
Routines, weights, progress over time, and a share card when a lift finally moves. It lives in your launcher instead of another icon you have to open.

A DAILY BRIEFING THAT STAYS ON YOUR PHONE
An optional short summary of your day, put together on your phone from your weather, calendar, habits and screen time. Nothing is uploaded.

PRIVACY, ACTUALLY
No ads. No tracking. No account, no sign-up, no email.

There is no analytics SDK in this app. Not one. Your settings, habits, workouts and usage stats live on your device and nowhere else.

FREE, AND WHAT ISN'T
The launcher, gestures, hiding, renaming, screen time, widgets, briefing: all free.

dialed in unlocks the whole thing — every app gated, unlimited routines and habits, more fonts, your own background photo. One payment, yours for life, with a 7-day free trial. On day 7 it ends and you decide.

There's also a tip jar if the app earned it. It unlocks nothing.

WHO THIS IS FOR
People who want off their phone but still need maps, banking and messages. Dumb phone curious, without the flip phone. Students, and anyone trying to hold a thought for more than nine seconds.

If you want a digital detox that doesn't mean giving up your phone, this is it. If you already know your screen time is bad, you don't need another app to tell you. You need one that gets out of the way.

A minimalist launcher for people who want less phone. Scroll less. It's not deeper than that.

PERMISSIONS

Accessibility Service: used only for the optional double-tap-to-lock gesture, so you can turn the screen off from the home screen. dialed does not read your screen content and collects no personal or sensitive data through this service.

Location: if you turn on the weather widget, dialed uses your approximate (non-precise) location to fetch a local forecast from Open-Meteo. It is not stored, not used for tracking, and not shared with advertisers. Leave the widget off and it is never requested.

Usage access: powers the screen time indicator. The data stays on your device.

Notification access: powers the glance screen, so you can read notifications without opening apps.

Query all packages: a launcher has to see your installed apps in order to launch them.