What’s on my phone

What’s your name and what do you do?

Rodrigo Ghedin. I learned to make websites in the early 2000s, got into journalism a while later, and ended up here, at Manual do Usuário.

What phone and operating system do you use?

I use an iPhone SE (2022) running iOS 18.5.

Tell us about your wallpaper.

My wallpaper is the iOS 18 default. I always use the current OS version’s default. I like this one because it’s beautiful and changes colors throughout the day. (Though some patterns, like the morning one, make it hard to read the status bar at the top of the screen.)

Why is your home screen set up the way it is?

My home screen is a mix of practicality and good incentives. Practicality to keep apps I need at key moments always at hand, like transportation/mobility ones. The good incentives consist of removing from my view those I try to use less on my phone, like email and the web browser.

I arrange the icons in the bottom row to reach them with my thumb. My phone is one of the last that can be used with just one hand. (I also use that feature that brings the screen down by double-tapping the home button a lot.)

I keep some widgets on the screen to the left of the main one: monthly calendar, battery level (because of AirPods), and bad habits I’m trying to quit and migraine episodes, which I monitor with Days Since. One cool thing about this app is that it shows the average interval between events, which is useful for tracking progress.

What apps do you use most?

The apps I use most on my phone are messaging apps (Signal and WhatsApp). Others worth highlighting are task apps (Reminders) and calendar (Calendar), though my approach with them is more “reactive” (I deal with notifications/alerts).

What’s the most obscure/weird/surprising app you use that you wish more people knew about?

I don’t keep many apps installed on my phone and prioritize the default ones, which I think are good enough and usually have better integration with the (eco)system.

That said, my favorite is NetNewsWire, a feed aggregator (RSS, Atom, JSON). It’s very well made, lightweight, pleasant to use. If all the apps I use daily were as well made as NetNewsWire, I think I’d use my phone more. (Maybe that’s not a good idea!)

The Meu Condomínio app might catch your attention. It’s (by far) the worst app on my phone and a side effect of writing Manual: it’s the price I pay for refusing to give up my facial biometrics to enter and exit my condo building.