I Sorted Every App on My Phone Into Two Piles

I'm building something about screen time. Not an app. Not a tracker. Something you hold in your hands. More on that later.

But the first step was deceptively simple: take every app on my phone and sort it into one of two categories.

Pile one: apps that do what you opened them to do, then let you leave.

Pile two: apps that don't want you to leave at all.

Calculator. Camera. Google Maps. Chase. These go in pile one. You open them with intent, you do a thing, you close them. They have no opinion about how long you stay.

Then there's pile two. TikTok. Reddit. Instagram. Twitter. YouTube. These apps have entire engineering teams whose job is to make sure you never, ever put your phone down. Infinite scroll isn't a design choice -- it's a business model.

Here's what surprised me: the gray area is bigger than I expected.

LinkedIn? Pile two. It pretends to be professional but it's running the same dopamine playbook as Instagram. Email? Depends on the client, but most of them have been optimized for compulsive checking. The Google app? Pile two. You open it to search one thing and fifteen minutes later you're reading about a plane crash in 1997.

ls doom-scroll-icons/ | wc -l
48

Forty-eight apps on my phone are designed to trap me. I knew the number would be high. I didn't think it would be that high.

The weird thing about sorting them is that it forces you to be honest. You can't pretend LinkedIn is a "productivity tool" when you're staring at a folder labeled doom-scroll-icons and its logo is sitting right next to TikTok's. The taxonomy doesn't lie. The visual is brutal.

I've been collecting the actual app icons -- high-res PNGs, properly named -- and organizing them into these two directories. It sounds tedious. It is tedious. But there's a reason I need the real icons, and it has to do with what this project actually becomes when it's finished.

I'm not ready to show that part yet. But I will say this: the act of sorting was supposed to be the boring prerequisite step. It turned out to be the part that changed how I think about my phone.

When you see your apps sorted into "tools" and "traps," you stop opening the traps as casually.

More on what this is becoming. Soon.