I made my phone slow on purpose — VineWall Notes<br>May 28, 2026<br>I made my phone slow on purpose<br>I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.

by Guilherme Campos<br>Founder

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.<br>Slowing down your own phone on purpose sounds&mldr; unconventional, but I had a good reason for it.<br>For a long time I struggled with doomscrolling. I tried the usual stuff (cold turkey, app blockers) but they didn&rsquo;t address the craving, and they were easy enough to bypass on top of that, none of it worked.<br>A thought experiment about cookies.<br>How far would you go for a chocolate cookie?<br>If you had a little machine in your pocket that baked a fresh<br>one any time you wanted, you&rsquo;d eat way more cookies than you<br>do now, probably one every time you got mildly bored.<br>But if the closest cookie were a four-hour drive away, you&rsquo;d<br>eat almost none, even if you love cookies.<br>Or if there were a cookie in your kitchen, but it was stale, you&rsquo;d<br>mostly leave it alone.<br>The phone, of course, is the cookie machine in your pocket.<br>So how do you make the cookies harder to get, or less appetizing?<br>Slow it down!<br>Making the phone slow<br>There are not many options to make a phone slower, but there is one that also happens to be the Achilles heel of<br>many apps that cause you to doomscroll: Internet speed.<br>Showing a new video every time you mildly flick your finger up,<br>at nearly instant speed, requires a fast and stable internet connection.<br>Knowing all that, I decided to build VineWall, an iOS app that can control the internet speed of some apps, and use this<br>control to make the &ldquo;cookie&rdquo; more stale and harder to get.<br>What exactly does a slow connection do to doomscrolling?<br>It squeezes the apps, tighter and tighter!

Unlimited speed

Capped speed, mild blocky

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<br>for the videos to get &ldquo;blocky&rdquo; and not look as crisp as we are used to.<br>As the scrolling continues, the throttling increases and video image quality decreases. Apps that rely on<br>text content (such as Reddit, X, Threads), will start to show gray boxes instead of images.<br>Eventually you will spend more time staring at loading spinners than anything else, and at this point a<br>question starts to sit in the back of your mind: Do I really want this cookie?<br>END

Other notes<br>May 19, 2026<br>Hello