Looking for a Dumb Phone alternative?

Dumb Phone replaces colourful icons and badges with plain buttons for your essential apps, turning an iPhone into a minimalist-style phone without buying one. Paused is a different shape of app, so this is a comparison rather than a pitch — the table starts with what Dumb Phone does better.

Dumb Phone vs Paused, side by side

	Dumb Phone	Paused
Known for	Dumb Phone replaces colourful icons and badges with plain buttons for your essential apps, turning an iPhone into a minimalist-style phone without buying one.	Block Schedules that switch your chosen apps off at set times and back on afterwards, one-tap Focus sessions for right now, and a streak that counts the days you kept the block.
Genuinely better at	The dumbphone feel. Dumb Phone gets closest to a stripped-down device while keeping the iPhone you own.	Paused keeps the iPhone as it is and makes the distracting apps unavailable on a schedule instead.
Day to day it feels like	Your Home Screen becomes a short text list of essential apps instead of a grid of icons and badges, so the distracting ones are simply not in front of you.	A small, boring wall. You pick the apps, pick the hours, and they stop opening — no coins, no plants, no hardware, no reasons to type. A calm Paused screen where the app used to be.

Stay with Dumb Phone if…

…you want the whole phone to feel boring, not just the blocked apps.

We would rather you kept an app that fits than switched and quietly turned it off after a fortnight. A blocker you have disabled is not a blocker.

What Paused does not do

Said up front, because this is the part comparison pages usually leave out.

iPhone and iPad only — no Android, Mac or browser extension.
No daily usage allowance right now: Paused blocks by schedule or by session, not by “30 minutes a day” (Daily Limits are on hold because of an iOS 18 Screen Time bug that affects every app in this list).
Nothing to earn, grow or scan — if that mechanic is what keeps you honest, several apps above do it better.
Self-control for your own phone, not a tool for managing someone else’s.

What you get if you do switch

Block Schedules. Pick the apps, pick the days and hours — 10pm–7am, 9–5, dinner — and they switch off and back on by themselves. Set once.
Focus sessions. One tap blocks your chosen apps for 25 minutes, two hours, or until dinner is over.
A streak. Every day the block holds, the count goes up. That is the whole reward system.
A calm block screen. Open a blocked app and you get a quiet Paused screen, not the feed.
Privacy by construction. Paused blocks through Apple's Screen Time framework, which enforces the block without the app reading your messages, browsing or anything inside the apps. Usage stays on your phone.