Your iPhone, Your Space
The iPhone is an amazing media & communications device, but it’s not a personal computer in the classical sense — it doesn’t help us think. This is a huge problem.1
Today, the iPhone is our most used, most personal device, so it should really function as a second brain. But in reality, it’s more like an information superhighway for the attention economy to plug straight into our brains.
For the iPhone to evolve into a personal computer, it needs to become a personal space we use for thinking. And this private space should be protected against invasive external forces that don’t have our best interests in mind. Your iPhone, your space.
Over the last few months, I started to take this simple idea very seriously, first as the conceptual foundation for my project ObjectSpaces, but soon as the overarching principle for how I use my iPhone. I was surprised to find how quickly my iPhone transformed into what feels like a personal computer.
Historically, I had never been very good at fighting spam. But once I started to think of my iPhone as my personal space, every piece of spam started to feel incredibly intrusive. So I began to ruthlessly revoke notification permissions for any app that sent me even a single spammy notification. I did this even for the DoorDash app because it sent me a discount promo one time, even though I knew I would be missing delivery updates that I actually need (thankfully, my doorbell still works).
I also looked at my Home Screen as my private space and started to “kick out” any apps that tended to distract me or shift my focus too much to the outside world. Soon, I was down to two Home Screen pages, around one page of apps and one page of widgets.
At this point, I took the space metaphor one step further. I started to think of every screen in the OS like a room in a house with a specific function. This meant every swipe or tap could function as a gesture instruction to take me to a different room dedicated to a particular use. This motivated me to downsize my Home Screen to just one page so that I could get to pretty much any “room” in the “house” with a single gesture instruction.
Finally, I needed the ability to extend the OS with many new “rooms” for specific topics or activities. For this, I used my project ObjectSpaces, which I designed specifically for collecting media objects and creating simple app-like interfaces. But I think you should be able to achieve something similar with any versatile mixed media tool like Apple Notes.
Here is what the “floorplan” for my iPhone looks like now:
These days, spending time on my iPhone feels much more balanced and calm. I don’t get interrupted randomly by something that isn’t worth my attention. I can find whatever I’m looking for almost instantly, so I spend much less time swiping around frantically. I rarely find myself asking, “What was I looking for?” or “What was I trying to do?”
Of course, I still spend plenty of time on social apps, but I end up there more on my terms, and the interesting things I find there don’t get scattered to the wind. The longer-form articles actually get read, the saves I want to revisit actually get revisited, and the links I wanted to share with a friend actually get shared at the appropriate time.
Overall, I feel in control. I feel like I have my space to think. It definitely feels like personal computing is back, this time on the iPhone.
Right now, many people seem eager to move on to a new form factor. But the iPhone is still the greatest piece of hardware ever invented, and its software foundation is the best we’ve seen in the history of consumer electronics. Plus, the design problems we’re seeing with the iPhone are likely to carry over to any system that replaces the iPhone.
So, I think it’s necessary and worth the effort to try to evolve the iPhone into a personal computer. And it seems like a new perspective might be all it takes to regain control and agency in our everyday computing.
References
Footnotes
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I explored this problem in much more detail in The Phone Is Not a Computer. ↩