I made one AI change on my iPhone, and a week later I can never go back

The much-vaunted rollout of Apple Intelligence has been the sort of curious drip-feed that means I'm convinced some iPhone users probably don't even realise they have new features on their phone. Visual Intelligence is the big attention-grabber, but Apple has quietly laced quite a few parts of iOS with new language to suggest it's AI-enhanced.

Along those lines, I've been doing some digital chores in the last couple of weeks. Along with finally changing all my exposed passwords, I was struck by a thought this weekend, which led me to a new and equally tedious job. After watching PewDiePie's viral video about how he's ditched Google services, one part where he praised a custom OS he was using on his phone stood out to me.

He was talking about how it didn't bother him with any suggestions or any AI tie-ins, and apps had no ability to talk to each other in background processes. It made me dig into my iPhone settings to see how close I could get to that reality. This was the first time I realised that every app in my settings list now had a new option, under a section called "Apple Intelligence & Siri".

The "Learn from this App" setting appears to be turned on for everything by default, and apparently links into Siri to let the assistant make suggestions "across apps". Lower in the same section, there are toggles to turn off suggestions for your chosen app on the home screen, or in searches and widgets.

Curious about how it would work, I spent a boring few minutes going through my entire list, turning off all of these settings for every single app, and the results have surprised me.

After a few years in which I'd slowly grown to rely (without realising it) on what app my phone thought I'd want to open being the next one I tap, all of a sudden, my iPhone no longer suggests anything at all. When I swipe down to search for something, the suggestions it gives me are seemingly random and basically never close to what I'm looking for.

Similarly, when I swipe to my home screen's right to access the App Library, the automatically grouped folders no longer have my most-read apps reliably at the top – the selection is a little more eclectic and sometimes even just in alphabetical order.

There are obvious downsides to this when it comes to convenience. It was clearly useful that my iPhone knew to suggest a train ticket app if I was in Edinburgh's main rail station, and the same goes for offering Citymapper if I was opening it up in a new location late at night.

However, in normal home use, I've been loving the slight detox that this has given my phone. It's made it so that apps I don't have on my home screen are just a little bit more buried, and need to be searched for more actively – making it easier to reduce my reliance on them, or indeed my addiction to them.

Plus, while Apple's privacy credentials are excellent by industry standards, I like the sense that apps don't just get to talk to each other and trade data points because of a setting I previously didn't even know was in the menus. I've taken back a small measure of control, and that's always empowering, however barely.

It's a useful reminder that while the conveniences we carry around in our pocket can start to feel like services we can't live without, many of us did just that for years without much trouble. Next in my list of chores – whittle down the subscriptions and stop paying for more than one cloud storage service, which promises even more admin for me to churn through at some point.