Ugh, Smartphones Again

I haven’t owned a smartphone for nearly ten years, and I haven’t missed them one bit. I consider them to be dangerous for multiple reasons, some practical and some spiritual. Their widespread adoption is one of the sadder developments I’ve been witness to.

My friends are all terminally online, though, and they consider my refusal silly or dramatic. This never really mattered until just recently, when they decided to stop communicating via SMS/MMS for security reasons. I understand completely--some of my friends are at-risk for depredations from the new government, and they need to be kept safe.

But the thought of getting another Slab of Doom is depressing and mildly nauseating. I don’t have an Apple or Google account--and refuse to get one--so I’ll need to source a ROM that doesn’t require any of that, and cheap compatible hardware and bootloaders and launchers and apps and a Signal account and...just more fussy techno-bullshit that adds no value to my life.

It’s not that I can’t do this. It just makes me sick that I have to.

naan96

Until recently I used a cheap ($150 USD) Motorola smartphone without a Google account (stock ROM). You don't actually have to log in on Google Android, at least on some devices/versions (this was 11/12). Hope that helps a bit. I actually got an Android (AOSP) dumb/feature phone recently but I have not been able to get Signal to work on that, so I am still dependent my old phone (the aforementioned Motorola) for some things.

If you are in the US (at least), make sure that whatever phone you end up buying and ROM you end up installing (and that specific combination, sigh...) has functioning VoLTE on your carrier or you will be in for an unpleasant surprise.

whiskeyding

I ended up with a $100 Pixel 5 that I loaded IodeOS on and stripped everything out but phone, messages, Signal, settings, and contacts. I'm using Before launcher to make it as simple as possible.

The pleasant surprise is the battery has 1200 charge cycles on it, and I worried it would need replacement...but with so few processes running, I'm getting 7 days of battery life on a 6-year old phone.

It's still too big, but it was the smallest thing I could find that was guaranteed to 100% work with a Lineage fork.

kirk781

While not directly related, smartphone adoption at a very young age by kids often leads to negative mental effects on them. Furthurmore, even in teens [and this is not a fault of Internet or smartphone per se], many folks are on social networks where other people just post the best versions of themselves and normal people compare their ordinary lives with the picture perfect images shown on social media leading to feelings of deficiency.

detritus

The obvious question is, if they are feeling that communications are insecure because of government repression, why are they moving *towards* instead of *away from* insecure, coercive, corporate, in sum, silicon-valley-dominated technology?

whiskeyding

They love tech, but won't think about it in a systematic way that might compel them to change their relationship to it. I've tried to get them to read Mumford or Ellul, but those are boring old books, and there is this cool Twitch streamer I just found out about...

kirk781

Well, reading a French philosopher and his concept of 'christian anarchism' sure would sound more daunting to anyone than a twitch stream :p.

Though in seriousness twitch streams are a waste of time. I know a guy IRL who watches it a lot and even pre programs bots in an RPG[?] game to win some real cash. Problem is, he spends way too much time and investment on something technically illegal, to earn relatively meagre.