Hacker News Reader

Comment by midoridensha | Hacker News Reader

>It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.

No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.

View on HN

The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that:

1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device

2. Rings and vibrates your device

3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device

4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number

No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!

If things were different, things would be different, certainly. But things are not different, so things are not different.

I assume you are using android or some ancient version of iOS.

Currently on iOS, #1 is not done by any app including the phone, and #2-#4 are in fact allowed by App Store apps.

It's a pocket computer.

The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.

The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.

When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.

I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.

I doubt people from the last century are the ones holding on to the idea of a phone call.

Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.

I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.

Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.

Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.

Not according to the mobile OS engineering teams at Apple or Google. Phone calls are intentionally given priority over other functions.

> Not according to the mobile OS engineering teams at Apple

Phone calls haven't forced full screen takeovers for several years on iOS, and have the same UX as 3rd party VoIP and Video call apps...

Priority isn't solely limited to forced full screen takeovers.

dating apps over phone calls is an absolutely ludicrous take that demonstrates a disconnect from reality

Definitely not. It depends on who you and your circle of friends are, of course, but dating apps are definitely way higher usage than phone calls among anyone I know. I use my phone as a phone less than half a dozen times per year. If the phone functionality vanished, I don't think I would mind.

the disconnect is that you're not able to see outside your bubble. Your average iphone or android user is using the phone function far more than dating apps

How do we know who is in a bubble? :) When I walk around downtown, I see hundreds of people on their phones, and maybe one or two of them is actually using it as a phone. Obviously I don't know if they're on dating apps specifically, but they are enormously popular, so it seems plausible.

A quick google search will show you that you could not be further from the truth :)

No, they're not. In the country I'm living in, *no one* uses phone calls except for rare things like delivery people calling because the box doesn't fit in your apartment's delivery boxes. Absolutely no one under the age of 50 uses voice calling to talk to their friends or family; they all use LINE texting.

I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day. For actual talking to friends/family, I use voice and video chat functions in chat apps.

You only do voice calls six times in a year?

Something on that order, yeah. Looking through my phone's call log, I had a call with a friend in mid-August, and another with another friend in mid-July. Prior to that was a call with my mom in April and that's as far back as the log goes.

You sound like you’re disconnected from reality.

Phone = Telephone: The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".

Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.

Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.

The save button icon is also a floppy disk.

And geometry is from the Greek γῆ (gê) 'earth, land', and μέτρον (métron) 'a measure', referring to it's original use as a tool for surveying farm plots in flood plains. It's obviously expanded much past that original definition to the point now that the original definition is simply one small application of the tool. In fact an application that the vast majority of practitioners will never administer.

Names change much slower the function generally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com