Minimalist launcher: why removing icons works, and why it isn’t enough

One of the smartphone’s great victories has been (partly) replacing the wristwatch. That way, the companies competing for our attention make sure we check our phones every so often, and the phone becomes a sophisticated trap: the moment you look at it, it shows you icons with notifications, colorful apps offering a quick hit of dopamine and even, on some manufacturers’ phones, ads built right into the interface. (Face unlock was another victory, because you no longer even have to unlock your phone consciously: you take it out to check the time, it recognizes your face and you’re right back in the sea of apps and distractions.)

As we explained in our previous article on what a launcher is, your phone’s home screen acts as a switchboard for your attention and, since it’s the first thing you see, it lays the groundwork for where you’ll direct it. Lots of people pick up their phone to check the time or reply to one particular message and, twenty minutes later, they’re watching a video they never went looking for, not quite sure how they got there.

Alternatives soon appeared to get around this, and minimalist launchers started showing up. The idea is a good one, but it has a limit: for a lot of people, they work for a few weeks and then gradually lose their effect.

What is a minimalist launcher?

On Android, the launcher is the app that draws your home screen: the icons, the folders, the drawer where you find all your apps… Your phone comes with one, but you can easily swap it for another.

A minimalist launcher is one that makes the screen deliberately boring (or maybe not boring, just simpler). They come in many styles: some leave only a short list of app names in plain text on a solid background, some do without color and others are carefully designed, but they all follow the same intuition: fewer things in sight, fewer things calling to you.

Why they work

They do work, no question. And it’s not just a feeling: there are at least three fairly well-studied reasons why.

The home screen is a trigger

In 2016, Tristan Harris, who was then working at Google studying how technology affects our attention, published an essay titled How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. One of his best-known ideas is that your phone works like a slot machine: every time you unlock it, you don’t know what you’ll find (a message, a “like” or nothing), and that uncertain reward is exactly what makes you pull the lever again and again.

If you think about it, the home screen is a grid full of levers. Every colorful icon is an invitation, sometimes with its little red notification badge, placed right in your path every time you pick up your phone. And you don’t even have to feel like opening Instagram. It’s enough that it’s there the moment your mind is looking for something to do for three seconds (in the checkout line, in the elevator, while something else loads).

A minimalist launcher moves the levers out of the way and doesn’t ban anything; it simply stops putting them in front of you.

Color pulls at you too

The icons of the most addictive apps aren’t brightly colored by accident. They’re designed to grab your attention, and they do. There’s a fairly concrete clue to how much this matters: in a study published in 2020 in The Social Science Journal, Alex Holte and Richard Ferraro asked a group of college students to set their phones to grayscale for a week, and their screen time dropped by about 38 minutes a day on average. Later studies have found effects in the same direction, though more modest ones.

Many minimalist launchers don’t go as far as removing color from the whole system (when you open an app, it looks the same as ever), but they do remove it from what you see when you unlock your phone, which is exactly the moment you decide what you’re going to do with it.

A little friction goes a long way

For us, the third reason is the most interesting. In 2023, researchers from Heidelberg University and the Max Planck Institute published a study in PNAS on one sec, an app that steps in for a few seconds when you try to open an app you’ve chosen to keep an eye on, and gives you the option not to open it. It doesn’t block anything; it just makes you wait a moment. Even so, after six weeks, the 280 participants were opening those apps 57% less (Grüning, Riedel and Lorenz-Spreen, 2023). In the interest of honesty, it’s worth knowing that one of the authors is the app’s creator, although the study design is published and anyone can review it.

The most revealing finding came from a second experiment by the same authors: what mattered most wasn’t the prompt to reflect, but having the option to back out right in front of you and, to a lesser extent, the short wait. In other words, you don’t need a ban. All it takes is a small step and a visible way out.

That, at heart, is what a good minimalist launcher does. When an app that used to be one tap away is now something you have to look for, the automatic gesture becomes a decision, even if it’s a small one. And in that small moment, a lot of the time, you decide not to.

Why it’s not enough

Here’s the limit: a minimalist launcher is, above all, a subtraction. It takes away icons, color and shortcuts, and in doing so, it leaves a gap.

Unlocking your phone doesn’t depend only on what’s on the screen; it also depends on your intentions. You might be bored, for example, or putting off an unpleasant task you don’t want to start, filling an awkward silence in the elevator or simply checking the time. Removing icons doesn’t make any of those reasons go away. The boredom is still there, the unpleasant task is still undone and the silence in the elevator is just as awkward. The only thing that’s changed is that now, when you unlock your phone, there’s nothing to fill it.

Your brain gets used to friction

And the brain learns fast. Friction works as long as looking for the app is still a decision, but over time that small step becomes automatic too. At first, you unlock your phone, see the empty screen and stop for a second to think about what you were doing. A few weeks later, your finger goes straight to the search bar, types the first three letters of Instagram from memory and you’re in before you’ve decided anything. The friction hasn’t gone away; you’ve just gotten used to it, and it’s become part of the same old gesture. Not seeing the sea of apps is still good for you, but the effect gradually fades.

This happens because the launcher still acts as a switchboard for your attention, if a less aggressive one, routing it toward the apps fighting for your time. If all you do is take things away, you’re not changing where your attention goes; you’re just putting obstacles in its path. And attention is a bit like water: block one outlet without opening another, and it ends up finding the nearest crack.

You don’t erase a habit. You replace it

Something similar happens with any habit you try to break. If you want to eat fewer sweets and all you do is stop buying them, you hold out for a few days, but within a week you’re running down to the corner store for something. What usually works is having something else on hand in that moment, like a piece of fruit. Eating it takes the edge off your hunger just the same, and you gain something too, because instead of fighting your sweet tooth, you’re eating something that’s good for you.

A harmful habit isn’t easy to just drop; it’s usually replaced by another one, and that works much better when the replacement gives you something instead of just forbidding the old one. The same goes for your phone. The urge to pick it up will keep showing up several times a day, so the useful question isn’t just how to curb it, but where you steer it when it shows up.

That’s why what’s needed is to give the launcher something to direct your attention toward: thinking about what you want to do with your time and steering your attention there, so the gap fills up with what really matters to you. And it doesn’t have to be work. It could be that call you’ve been putting off for three days, the book you’re halfway through or remembering that you wanted to go for a run today. What matters is that, in those seconds when your mind is looking for something to do, it finds something you chose, not something someone else chose for you.

What about a dumbphone?

A dumbphone, for example, is the extreme version of the same idea, which is why it has a similar effect. But the gap it leaves is much bigger, because it takes away the option and the tools altogether instead of hiding them behind friction. And a bigger gap, with nothing to fill it, is also harder to stick with.

The question that matters: what do you want to see when you unlock your phone?

If the problem isn’t just what’s on the screen, but why you look at it and how it steers your attention, the question changes. It’s no longer about how many apps you want in sight, but about what you’d like to find in those seconds when your mind is looking for something to do.

For almost everyone, the honest answer would be what’s on their plate today, their calendar or what they’d set out to do. It’s not about being productive all the time (we don’t want to be slaves to ourselves), but about knowing what you need to do and doing it when it’s time. That’s the difference between a home screen that takes things away and one that gives you something.

How we tackle it in duqe

duqe grew out of that problem. The first idea was a launcher that would reduce screen time and let you focus with Focus mode. During development, though, we ran into the gap we talked about above, and the app ended up being something else. We wanted a launcher that didn’t take features or tools away from you, but added them, and that turned your phone into the tool it should be.

That’s why, in duqe, when you unlock your phone you don’t see a list of apps, you see your day: today’s tasks, your events and whatever’s still pending. The apps are still there, in the drawer, but only the ones you choose to add. If you want to see how it works under the hood, we cover it in what a launcher is and how duqe changes it.

Sources

• T. Harris (2016), “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist,” essay published on Medium and on tristanharris.com.
• A. J. Holte and F. R. Ferraro (2020), “True colors: Grayscale setting reduces screen time in college students,” The Social Science Journal, 60(2), 274-290. doi:10.1080/03623319.2020.1737461
• D. J. Grüning, F. Riedel and P. Lorenz-Spreen (2023), “Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(8), e2213114120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2213114120