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Daniel Oropeza Daniel Oropeza Shopping Editor Experience Daniel is Lifehacker's Shopping Editor covering tech deals and reviewing TVs, headphones, speakers, and projectors. He earned his master’s in journalism from Columbia University and has reported for the Miami Herald. He lives in Atlanta. Read Full Bio ...

I've written before about various software tricks to nudge a smartphone toward dumb-phone territory: stripping the home screen down to essentials, enabling greyscale mode, scheduling downtime windows. I tried all of it, and for a time it worked for me, but only in the way that hiding a bag of chips in a high cabinet works—technically an obstacle, but not really a barrier. One tap to "Ignore Limit," and I'm back to scrolling. The problem is that the key to unlock everything is right there in your pocket. Turns out I needed a small device called Brick to physically restrain me create a physical barrier, and I can feel my screen time habits finally change for the better. How Brick works with your smartphoneBrick is a small NFC fob—roughly the size of an AirPods case—paired with an app. You ...

While iOS has caught up in recent years, Android is still the most versatile OS when it comes to smartphone gaming—especially if you're looking beyond downloading games from app stores. Android supports a huge number of emulators, as well as game controllers and game pads. If you want to play a game, there's a decent chance you can get it up and running on Android. And yet, the OS doesn't have something that many other modern gaming platforms do: native controller remapping. The idea is, you get to choose which of your controller's buttons do what. If you'd prefer your down button to have the same effect as the L1 button, or the D-pad to have the same inputs as the right stick, you can. While individual Android games may offer these options, it doesn't apply to the entire OS, which leads t...