If anyone wants a de-googled privacy focused phone and has a pixel phone you can make a degoogled phone for free by installing GrapheneOS.
If want, to just buy a degoogle phone. I’ve created a company that sells refurbished pixel 5a with GrapheneOS installed https://www.ShellphoneX.com
- Respects my privacy. It's not tracked or surveilled. Contacts and communications are not logged and recorded.
- Doesn't alert with spam calls and texts multiple times per day.
- Has days of batter and weeks of standby.
- Can provide an emergency data link ("tethering") for my other mobile devices when necessary.
- Avoids emissive displays. E-ink is rapidly becoming a strong preference for me.
- Hardware buttons.
- Folds away keyboard/touchpad. No butt-dialing.
- Physical headphone jack.
- Small pocketable format.
Nice-to-haves above and beyond that: notes/remiders, clock / timer / alarm, mapping / directions (with disableable / activate-only-when-needed GPS), and transit / travel information.
Almost all other substantive uses are far better applied to a larger format device --- probably a tethered e-ink tablet as a first option (8" -- 13"). I'd still like an e-ink keyboarded ultra-light laptop / notebook as well. I'll wait ...
I'm ... close ... to simply going in for a pager with very limited access (as in, nobody but top priorities can reach it), and I can reach back out via another option.
PSTN is dangerously near death, not just wireline / POTS but mobile as well.
- I deactivated notifications for most apps. If necessary, I setup in-app notifications (Discord notifies me about a new personal message, but not about a random post on the "general" channel)
- I don't use the facebook app, but I have a link to facebook.com on my icon screen, browsed firefox
- ublock origin extension for firefox
- if a random notification happens, long click on it allows deactivating the next ones from the same app
- I deactivated incoming email notifications. If I want to read my emails, I open the client. I guess it saves battery too.
- In France we have an app to detect spam or phishing calls. It can event prevent the phone ringing when detected as such.
At its core is the mobile phone data network itself, which provides sufficiently fine (and largely utilised) location tracking, vox activity, and Internet data usage tracking and association with a single device. The foundation is shit, no golden castle can be constructed on it.
Source: Android owner for nearly 15 years, infosec background, numerous exploits, data disclosures, white papers, etc.
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/mobile-phones-location-trackin...
https://ssd.eff.org/en/playlist/privacy-breakdown-mobile-pho...
That's easy. Learn to type 120wpm. Going from 120wpm on a laptop to 30wpm on a phone will seem like pure agony. Unfortunately, you'll still be addicted to the internet, but at least you can't take your laptop into the can with you. Well, not in public, anyway.
It's not agonising and if you use the tech more (just like the computer), you improve
And on the accessibility shortcuts you can also set it so triple-pressing the home button instantly toggles between B&W/Colour so (for example) you can the colours on a photo you've just taken.
If I could get a dumb phone that could still run Google/Apple/Any Maps for GPS purposes, I'd be first in line.
The smartphone UX is all kinds of poor, I'm immediately repulsed and turned off by it versus a keyboard and mouse. Hamburger menus at the top of a now-very-tall screen? Yeah, fuck that.
There's also the YouTube app (needed for Chromecasting YouTube from iPhone), and Google Calendar.
(I'm sure it's at least somewhat intentional along those lines that it hasn't become GTube or something over the years.)
I have just one Google app installed: Maps. Its location settings are set to only allow location access when the app is open, so it collects very little data useful to Google. I can probably switch to Apple Maps, but I don't know whether the quality of navigation and public transport data is as good as Google Maps. If it turns out to be similar, I'm likely to switch, because I'm only staying with GMaps thanks to the data quality.
So for these reasons I've never understood how someone could find their phone addicting. It's an ad-displaying machine with terrble UX and limited functionality that can also do comms. I browse social media like Twitter, etc., on my laptop. I can't understand how anyone would ever want to do that on mobile.
My favorite phone I've ever owned was still my Lumia 1020 back in the golden days of windows phone. That phone embodied the two tasks I care about (comms and taking pictures), had a dark-mode UI way before that became popular, and generally just stayed out of the way and was performant.
^ This. My app install strategy is zero apps installed by me.
You don't come right out and say it but there's definitely a virtuousness angle here. If other people were just good in the ways you are good, they wouldn't have these problems. They have in some sense the ability to avoid these consequences, and so they are choosing to have them. They deserve them, in a sense. Right?
The point of posting it was clearly attempting to understand/relate.
This is like saying "I don't abuse alcohol, therefore I can't understand how others could abuse alcohol."
Good for you, dude. I guess be thankful that you don't have these struggles, but try to understand that your life experience isn't necessarily shared.
it's made me realize how much of our recent world has been built around everybody having a smartphone. for example, QR codes for menus and to pay for parking, etc, is not a very equitable world.