Using Blank Space to Make a Minimalist iPhone Home Screen
According to recent statistics, the average American checks their phone 344 times per day (about once every four minutes). And before you say, “other people may struggle with this, but I’ve got it under control,” I dare you to go into your Settings and look at your Screen Time stats. The truth is, we all struggle with this stuff. And the deck is kind of stacked against us.
As Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky (two ex-Google engineers) say in their book Make Time: “When we use our smartphones... we get futuristic superpowers and addictive distraction, together, on every screen. The better the technology gets, the cooler our superpowers will become — and the more of our time and attention the machines will steal.” The book makes a compelling argument for being intentional with our technology.
There are two specific things they advise us to avoid when using our devices:
- Infinity pools or endless feeds that continue to feed content into our eyeballs.
- The busy bandwagon or constant stream of notifications telling us what to do.
The trick is to do what we want with our devices without letting them steal from us. So over the years, I’ve done quite a bit to protect my focus when using my iPhone. I’ve removed email from my phone, changed my Home Screen apps for widgets, set up Focus Modes, even tried running everything in grayscale mode for a while to make using my phone less appealing. I even considered using a device called The Light Phone, a minimal phone with a text-based launcher, but I could never get myself to actually do it because I use MindNode every day and use Drafts to capture ideas essential to my creative workflow.
Then I came across an app called Blank Spaces, which I’ve been using for a couple of months now to give me the power of the iPhone with the focus of the Light Phone. If you want something to help facilitate intentional technology use, you might love it too.
How it Works
The app gives you two widgets which comprise the Home Screen layout: one smaller one at the top, and one larger one in the middle. The middle widget acts as a launcher and contains text-based links that you can use to either open an app or run a Shortcut. All of these links are configured inside the app on your iPhone, and can be both reordered and relabeled to include custom text instead of the app or Shortcut name.
| Widget Position | Available Options and Features |
|---|---|
| Top Widget | Blank space, the date, day of the week, an analog clock, weather, and a 5-day forecast. |
| Middle Widget | Text-based launcher, app links, Shortcut execution, custom labeling, and reordering. |
Customizing the Appearance
You can customize a couple of options like font and text size, but to achieve the visual effect of a transparent text-based launcher, the app does a couple of clever things. First, the name of the app once you install it on your iPhone is completely blank. This allows you to add widgets to your Home Screen without having the app name appear below the widget itself, keeping your Home Screen clean and minimal.
Second, the app uses a neat trick to remove the background color from the widgets and achieve the illusion of the text sitting directly on top of the wallpaper. To do this, you take a screenshot of the wallpaper on an empty Home Screen and then import it into the app. The app then slices the image and applies the background to the widgets so that they match the wallpaper positioning perfectly. It works best when you have Reduce Motion enabled.