DumbPhone: Minimal Home Screen 4+

Works well, has potential, room for more

It works fine for what its supposed to do. I wish it had more customization options, particularly regarding the background. I know widgets don’t support custom images but maybe some themes, gradients, or preset images would be cool if possible, especially ones to push home the retro phone feel. And maybe an option for line breaks between list items, if at all possible. And maybe even an “icon” theme selection. Where maybe the user can select “Square Letter” or “circled letter” and the app simply concatenates a unicode icon associated with the first letter of the app name - stuff like that. Cool app 👍

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.