May 28, 2026

I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.

Last year I got a brand new iPhone 17 shortly after it came out. It was a bit ironic to spend that much on a phone just to build the thing that would slow it down.

Slowing down your own phone on purpose sounds… unconventional, but I had a good reason for it.

For a long time I struggled with doomscrolling. I tried the usual stuff (cold turkey, app blockers) but they didn’t address the craving, and they were easy enough to bypass on top of that, none of it worked.

A thought experiment about cookies.

How far would you go for a chocolate cookie?

If you had a little machine in your pocket that baked a fresh one any time you wanted, you’d eat way more cookies than you do now, probably one every time you got mildly bored.

But if the closest cookie were a four-hour drive away, you’d eat almost none, even if you love cookies.

Or if there were a cookie in your kitchen, but it was stale, you’d mostly leave it alone.

The phone, of course, is the cookie machine in your pocket. So how do you make the cookies harder to get, or less appetizing? Slow it down!

Making the phone slow

There are not many options to make a phone slower, but there is one that also happens to be the Achilles heel of many apps that cause you to doomscroll: Internet speed.

Showing a new video every time you mildly flick your finger up, at nearly instant speed, requires a fast and stable internet connection.

Knowing all that, I decided to build VineWall, an iOS app that can control the internet speed of some apps, and use this control to make the “cookie” more stale and harder to get.

It squeezes the apps, tighter and tighter!

Right off the bat the speed is capped at the speed of a spotty cellular connection. It is not enough to stop any app, but enough for the videos to get “blocky” and not look as crisp as we are used to.

As the scrolling continues, the throttling increases and video image quality decreases. Apps that rely on text content (such as Reddit, X, Threads), will start to show gray boxes instead of images.

Eventually you will spend more time staring at loading spinners than anything else, and at this point a question starts to sit in the back of your mind: Do I really want this cookie?

END