Notes from Phone That Cares
So you want to do stuff Google doesn't expect with Android
A map of what you give up to Google as you climb toward a more opinionated phone.
These are the moves a developer can make to build an intention-management layer on Android — a phone, a launcher, or an app that actively tries to help you use it less. Each row below is a move you (or your user) takes. Each column in the second table is a piece of Google's ecosystem that might stop cooperating in response.
If you want to ship a Play Store app that vibrates once an hour as a check-in, Google doesn't stand in your way — Move 1 is unrestricted. But if you want to lay a color-drain overlay on top of Instagram that ramps to grayscale over twenty minutes, you need an API Google classifies as "accessibility" and polices heavily (Move 2). If you want to modify how Instagram actually renders its feed, no sanctioned path exists — the only way is to climb higher, and the higher you climb, the more Google services stop working on the device.
These notes are the residue of an adversarial collaboration between two Claude Opus instances — one arguing each intervention was impossible on stock Android, one arguing it was possible — plus a round of web research into Android developer docs, Play policy, and the custom-ROM communities. Published here in case they help anyone else working in this space. Current as of April 2026; Google's posture keeps shifting, so treat each cell as a snapshot.
The three example interventions
The Phone That Cares app ships all three, per-app. Each has a different cost as you go up the moves. Tap one to see how it maps to the rest of this page.
Moves the developer (or user) can make
Least departure from Google's defaults at top; most at bottom. The thicker line between Move 4 and Move 5 is the big threshold — everything above 4 is still an app. Move 5 requires unlocking the phone's bootloader.
| # | Move | User setup | Distribution |
|---|
What breaks at each move
Hover any cell (desktop) or tap it (mobile) to see the specific story. Cells marked Y tend to "just work" — the ones marked ~ and N have caveats.