Making any Android phone a dumbphone
About 6 months ago I made my Samsung S22 into a dumbphone and it has drastically changed my life for the better. I have not seen anyone else mention this method on this subreddit so I thought I would share. I had a Blackberry classic and Qin 1s in the past but they didn't work for me. I had been interested in some of the e-ink dumbphones but they were way too expensive and slow/bad. So I set out to find an app-blocker that couldn't be uninstalled in my moments of weakness. I also didn't want to root my phone for security reasons. I came across some apps that required shizuku to work, but the need to reenable it every time the phone is restarted was more tedious than I wanted and I could just restart the phone if my resolve waned. I then discovered dhizuku. It gives you less control over phone than shizuku, and consequently there are far fewer apps that use it, but it stays activated when your phone is restarted. I found an app that uses dhizuku permission called Amarok. It hides any apps that you want including google and the play store and you need to enter a password to unhide the apps. I gave the long randomly generated password to my wife and mother so I ask one of them if I need to update an app or look up something in an emergency situation.
I never tried unistalling the app as I figured it would be too much of a hassle to re-setup. But I believe the apps I hid would remain hidden even if amarok was uninstalled. However, to prevent me deleting amarok I used another dhizuku app called "owndroid". With owndroid I was able to block the uninstall of amarok and then I hid owndroid with amarok so I couldn't turn that feature off.
It has changed my life more than I could have imagined. My screentime now averages less than an hour a day. I use my podcast app, audiobook app, banking, camera, weather, music player and that's about it. Of course, you could make it as dumb as you want and still have a much better and cheaper phone that has higher call quality and reliability than any dumbphones on the market.
The apps I initially hid with amarok were chrome, samsung internet, play store and youtube.
Later on I uninstalled ebay and amazon as well as I didn't want to be able to impulse buy and waste time shopping.
Finally, I hid google and newpipe. These might be less distracting for some but I needed to get rid of them for myself. Newpipe is much better than youtube for me because I turned off all video recommendations. I wouldn't be constantly advertised videos that would take me down an algorithm rabbit hole. But that got too distracting for me too. Google was cool for a little while. I could search stuff and get AI answers and image results but I still couldn't click on any weblinks. I blocked this eventually too for personal reasons. Blocking Google removed my ability to use "lens" so I can't easily reverse image search cool insects anymore. It also blocks Android Auto from working but I have an older truck so that's no big deal.
Getting dhizuku to work took a little trial and error with ADB but now that it's on my phone my whole life has changed for the better. I also use olauncher. I'd be happy to answer any one's questions but I don't use reddit often, just wanted to share what has worked so well for me.
tl;dr found a cool app called Amarok that hides distracting apps and has no work arounds. You need to install dhizuku for it to work. My life is way better!
edit: Google maps still works and so does gmail with the google app hidden.