How’s this for a long-term grift. Tech companies have spent over a decade selling us increasingly powerful smartphones, ditching simple sets of physical number buttons in favor of touch screen supercomputers. Every year we hear about more and more incredible new phone features, that of course require higher and higher prices. And now that it’s obvious that being distracted by your phone all day maybe isn’t great for you, those same companies turn around and give us a literal piece of paper to dumb down these $1,000 devices into the equivalent of a 90s flip phone.
I’m not mad about Google’s phone envelope. I’m impressed.
As reported by Android Police, this phone envelope comes from Google’s Digital Wellbeing special projects, experimental devices to help us integrate omnipresent technology more harmoniously into our every day lives. And it really is just a slip of paper your slide your phone into. Big Nintendo Labo energy.
In conjunction with the Play Store app, the envelope greatly reduces what you can do with your phone by blocking the screen entirely. You can only make and receive calls or check the time. You can’t waste hours of your life being depressed at whatever scrolls by your Twitter feed. It only works with Pixel 3A phones, but that also means Envelope can shield you against unwanted Google Stadia sessions. Removing the phone seems purposefully annoying enough that you really need to commit. And you can see exactly how long your self-discipline lasted, like a more extreme version of Screen Time.
If your phone habits are out of control and you need to take your life back, download the PDF and print Envelope for yourself. It’s open source on GitHub so you can even customize it to bring back features like the camera.
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