HMD delivers Android Digital Detox feature to stop you scrolling your life away

Update for Skyline phone brings selective distraction blocking

A couple of months after launch, an OS update has delivered one of the Nokia HMD Skyline's headline features.

We took a look at HMD's Skyline repairable smartphone in August. This month, a software update has enabled one of the more interesting features of this user-repairable mid-range Android fondleslab – selective social media blocking.

HMD is the company that makes modern Nokia-branded handsets, and it markets some of them – essentially its 21st century feature devices – as "detox phones." Now the self-proclaimed largest smartphone maker in Europe is bringing Digital Detox to its premium model.

Digital Detox offers more than Android's built-in "Digital Wellbeing" tools such as Focus Mode. It aims to reduce the distracting allure of social networks when you need to concentrate, while leaving your phone working and usable.

You can invoke the app either via an optional button you can add to the phone's Quick Settings panel, or a screen-width widget that you can add to your home screen. Both share a logo showing a stylized fondleslab atop what we reckon is a yin-yang symbol.

It offers 14 categories of application it can block, plus an "Others" group for things it can't quite pin down. For us, that included the Aer Lingus app, BlueSky and Mastodon clients, and an applet that sets our wallpaper to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. In each category, you can select specific apps to block, or block the whole category. You can also selectively block contacts from your address book, or all of them. You can schedule Detox activation, and also set a custom wallpaper for when it's on.

When you activate the function, all the apps you've blocked become unavailable. Their icons are replaced with black circles with a grey padlock logo. You can't open them, or switch to them if they were already open, and they can't send notifications.

Manually activating the block offers three pre-programmed durations: one, two, or four hours, or a custom selection where you can choose a whole number of hours up to 24. Two levels of lock are available, the difference being that you can turn Soft Lock off again. If you choose Hard Lock, it can't be disabled until the time runs out without rebooting your phone.

While the idea is good, the snag is that we could still open the web browser and go to facebook.com or twitter.com no problem, even if the clients were blocked. During one of our previous efforts to curtail our addiction to pocket distraction machines, we removed all social network clients from our handset.

This is version 1.0.0 of the app, and it does what it says on the tin – but it will have to get considerably cleverer to foil determined Facebook junkies. We would suggest that HMD adds value by bundling some form of DNS-based ad-blocker, and while Detox Mode is active it redirects all blocked web domains to 127.0.0.1, or something like that.

Yet as a first effort, we like the idea. The functionality is also achievable by third-party apps, of which there are several. Having it built right in is easier, though, and should – in theory at least – be harder to circumvent (even if it's not, just yet).

There are also hardware distraction blockers out there, such as the Brick. Sadly iPhone-only for now, this gadget is effectively a fridge magnet that you stick to your desk (or wherever you need it) and puts your phone into distraction-free work mode when it's nearby.

Bonus points for trying, but the bars of the cage still need to be considerably stronger than this. ®