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Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently reading Digital Minimalism from Cal Newton and have started preparing for a 30-day digital declutter. So I was really excited to read this title and immediately disappointed after clicking - the Cat phone has a web browser. If you have access to the entirety of the internet in your pocket, it is hard to limit yourself and no little trick or hack is going to actually help - in my experience.

I'll go ahead and take advantage of this post to ask, what do other digital minimalists on HN use for their phone? I'm looking for something with messages, maps, a camera, and WhatsApp with no access to a browser or an app store. The most difficult item on that list is definitely WhatsApp. Unfortunately, if you travel a lot (which I do) it's not really optional. Outside of North America, EVERYTHING happens on WhatsApp. I've started looking into custom Android ROMS but that feels like an extreme step for what must be a common problem?

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I never switched to smartphones to not have internet in my pocket, and so I sticked to Sony Ericsson phones. Currently I use a 2010 Sony Ericsson Elm (J10i) which gives me SMS, phone, camera, and a few utilities : calendar, alarms, calculator, flashlight. Dimensions are 110.00 x 45.00 x 14.00 mm, I recharge once every ten days or so

I could be wrong, but I imagine the number of people who need internet access for Maps and WhatsApp but NOT a web-browser would be pretty small.

That said, I could possibly recommend the Nokia 2720 flip, which I've been using it as a secondary phone for work, primarily just for calls and messages. It runs KaiOS and has WhatsApp and Maps installed, although it does also have an internet browser. That said, it's quite clunky to use with the numberpad, and you might be able to hack it to disable or remove it. There's a dedicated KaiOS hacking community which might be able to get you there[0]. Looking briefly, I think there's a hack that allows you to set a proxy for the web browser, so maybe you could set that to something useless?

I commend your efforts, and am curious to read that book you mentioned!

[0] https://next.bananahackers.net/

You could just delete the apps you don't want.

https://android.stackexchange.com/a/231279

This is actually really helpful. I'd be concerned that deleting the browser would result in other apps breaking but that's probably a risk worth taking.

The atom filled this niche for me - https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom

It’s a full phone, with a web browser, and you can do all the normal phone stuff with it but it’s size dissuades you from doing so. It’s functional to text or Spotify but annoying to spend a lot of time on the web with it. So in a pinch you can but you won’t want to.

Same thing (Jelly 2). Just had to learn "glide typing" but it's the best phone I ever had.

I think KaiOS is probably the closest thing that you can find. It will also have a browser, but trust me when I say that on most phones it's so slow and unusable that you won't be tempted to use it often.

I had a similar issue for myself, only my strongly desired application was Spotify (instead of WhatsApp). Ultimately I weaned myself off Spotify through a phone with KaiOS and ultimately I took the plunge on buying the Light Phone II.

It's a real bummer that there are so many limited solutions for things like this. FWIW, the contracted software company that worked on the Light Phone OS put together a blog post detailing how they used Android to build their phone here:

https://medium.com/sanctuary-computer-inc/building-lightos-w...

> All of that is to say: when we refer to the LightOS, we are referring to “our custom fork of Android 8.1 that embeds a platform-signed React Native app as the default launcher” (amongst other drivers and low-level customizations).

I've been thinking about this too. I don't think this really exists. I think you really just have to use self control to avoid using the browser.

  > you really just have to use self control

Why is this skill no longer taught to children?

I don't understand how what you are describing can also be minimalist.

It's some kind of aesthetic, but people used to do fine without digital maps or messaging.

Those things are useful tools but not mindless time sucks. You can't doom scroll for an hour in a maps or camera app.

Which 'useful tools' is going to be pretty personal, not universal, which is why I acknowledged that an intentionally limited device is probably some kind of aesthetic.

It's hilariously tedious to argue that WhatsApp is obviously required and then some other social communication tool is obviously a waste of time.

Not really. There are really broad shared categories. Nearly all social media is a time suck for nearly everybody. Twitter is a time suck for most but a useful tool for many. Messaging apps are a useful tool for most but a time suck for some. Maps is useful for pretty much everyone. You get the drift; there are few universals, but clear distinctions do exist.

Similar demands here, albeit a wee-bit different,

Messages (or perhaps preferably Signal) Maps Camera BankID Calendar.

  > Outside of North America, EVERYTHING happens on WhatsApp.

I've never installed WhatsApp on my phone. If someone wants to communicate with me, it's either a phone call or Telegram. If the ability to converse is less important than installing Telegram, then apparently they didn't really need to talk to me.

For context, I'm a software developer. Other than the Jetbrains IDEs everything on my desktop is open source, and I've got no more than half a dozen apps installed on my Android device. I can almost get away without touching the the phone on weekends, save for the camera.

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