DumbPhone: Minimal Home Screen 4+

Great Idea!

Slight learning curve, but worth it. Wonderful flexibility. Enables me to provide access to whatever apps I use while simplifying my screen. I can also personalize its appearance with colors and fonts. I’m using this on my iPhone and my iPad and discovering more about it and about Shortcuts. This app is making the use of both devices faster and more efficient.

Could Be Perfect, Major Flaws

I chose this app for the price & simplicity of setup, and in thar regard, the app is great, many of the subscription model options on the app store are at best overpriced & at worst predatory. Unfortunately, as it stands this app does not do what is promised, in that a core feature (adding your own apps & shortcuts) just does not work. It doesn’t matter what I try, or if i follow the tutorials provided exactly, if the app you have isn’t on the preset list (and let me be clear, the list is not great, it’s missing some of many of the most used apps on the app store) you’re going to struggle to add it to your widget or not be able to do it at all.

Once this issue is fixed, this app would be the best one available to people looking for a simple non-financially intrusive choice to make their phone lighter & break the habits of checking it, but right now, I’d avoid it.

Developer Response ,

The problem has been fixed, please update to the latest version.

Widgets broke

Recently experienced issues where the widgets stopped working. This happened after noticing for a couple weeks that some of the touch gestures on the phone got wonky when the widgets were on the screen (like slide down to launch search or slide up to scroll apps). The developers advice was to uninstall and reinstall. Doing so, I lost all of the stored configurations.

I definitely was a bit put off by the devs casual response that I just essentially spend 45 minutes of my own time setting everything up again.

I had another dumb phone app that I fell back to (had previously used and configured). It didn’t have as many aesthetic customizations, but it also seemed far more stable. I’ll be going with that one for the foreseeable future.

Developer Response ,

Already everything is working as it should and there will be no more problems like this.