The 4th developer beta (3rd public beta) has been rough on my iPhone the past week. I’ve had many crashing issues, really poor performance, instances of the whole UI freezing up for 10 seconds at a time randomly, and unexplainable heat when the phone was sitting idle. I was going to wait for the next beta in hopes these problems would go away, but yesterday my camera started to not work at all (rebooting numerous times did nothing) so I had to do a full wipe of the phone.

I took the opportunity to install as little on the phone as possible, in hopes that it would turn the phone into a more intentional device than an all-purpose one. As you can see from the image above, my home screen is pretty damn empty now, and there isn’t much past that first page. Right now, my phone is good at communicating, getting the news,reading my email, playing music/podcasts, and playing a game.

The biggest change for me is that I removed all work-related apps, including Slack. Now I will likely have to go back on this, as it is sometimes convenient to have those on my phone, but as of right now it’s nice not to have any way to have work impede on my personal life. Once I close my work laptop at the end of the work day, I’m completely cut off: no emails, no Slacks, no calendars, nothing.

If anyone wants to take bets on how long this will last, I’d say the over/under is 3 days 😋