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Comment by allthecybers | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to quit my smartphone and have looked at options like Lite Phone to replace it. The only issue is my smartphone is now my GPS, my payment method, my home lighting controller, my car/house key, and my health tracker. Plus, was a convenient way to keep tabs on work messages.

Half a decade ago I eliminated all my social media. Then about a year ago I started by removing work email and messaging from my phone.The next step will be having a designated spot for it to stay while I'm home.

I don't know if I will ever revert back to having a thick wallet and a pocket full of keys, but maybe someday I can evolve to look at the smartphone as a utilitarian device without the addictive qualities.

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> The only issue is my smartphone is now my GPS, my payment method, my home lighting controller, my car/house key, and my health tracker.

If you use GPS only for navigation in a car, get a Garmin or something similar.

Payment: Is it that hard to use a CC like most people do...? I only recently used my phone for payments (lost card and was waiting for replacement), and did not find it any more convenient than using a card.

Lighting: Do you need to do this only at home or away from home? If the former, buy a Google Home (albeit that has its own issues...)

Car/house key: Sorry, no experience with this. I'd be terrified of using my phone that way.

Health tracker: No experience with this, so I don't know how you use it and what the alternatives are.

> Half a decade ago I eliminated all my social media. Then about a year ago I started by removing work email and messaging from my phone.The next step will be having a designated spot for it to stay while I'm home.

Good steps. I never allowed work stuff on my phone. And if I take it out at home, I'll leave it wherever I took it out. I have a PC so I don't need the phone (and yes, it's great that the PC is not mobile). I use my VoIP line as my main phone, so I have those all around the house. People know I may not answer my cell phone at home due to me not hearing it ring.

> thick wallet

How thick is thick? 1-2 credit cards, 1-2 debit cards. Not that thick.

Not OP, but in a similar place for the phone somewhat dominating on the go stuff. Its just incredibly freeing leaving the house with only my phone. These days it can handle payment most places. It is my library card. My bus pass. My car key. My camera. My paperback novel. My guide. My gym pass. It lets me know when my bus or train is running late. It lets me know when that store is going to close, or if its even open on a Sunday. All the while providing music while on the go and entertainment when sitting around.

When I've got my phone, I don't need my keys. I don't need my wallet. I don't need a book. I can have a whole night out with the only thing on me is my phone, other than a few bucks stashed in my shoe for emergency bus fare.

And what do you do if you run out of batteries? Or lose the phone? Or it gets wet and won't turn on?

You can't even drive your car?

My phones have failed me on multiple occasions over the years.

It doesn't really run out of batteries. I'm not talking about going to the moon, I'm talking about going across town. It charges pretty quick, and it can charge in the car, so I'm rarely out and about with it less than 50% charged. Which is good enough for at least 8 hours of active usage with its current battery health and age, a good bit more if I bother stretching it.

What happens if I lose my wallet? What happens if I lose my car keys? Its not like these other things are immune to "what if it gets lost?" Sure, there's a bit of risk tying it all to one thing, but in the end I'm not talking about being more than a few hours walk to home or a friend's house. And like I said, I usually carry enough cash in my shoe to cover a half day fare.

At least for my car, I do have a backup code I can type in and access it.

My phone is waterproof. Its durable enough, its fallen out of my pocket while riding my bike before and been fine. I did have a problem of breaking phones in the past, but since waterproof phones and far more durable screens have been a thing I haven't really lost any to damage since. The last time I broke a phone was 2012. It seems like if I managed to break my phone I'm likely to be picked up by an ambulance anyways.

Not OP but

> And what do you do if you run out of batteries?

My battery lasts 2 days. If I'm away for a night I pack a charger along with my toothbrush and clothes. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was caught off guard by this.

> Or lose the phone?

Short term - same as if I lose my keys or my wallet. It's a giant pain in the ass. longer term, doesn't matter, new phone + restore from backup. I don't need to phone my bank and cancel my cards, or change the locks on my doors in case my keys were pickpocketed and I'm targeted.

> Or it gets wet and won't turn on?

Many smartphones have been ip68 rated for the best part of a decade. Note that to not turn on, you're realistically talking about submerging it, not just being out in the rain. Maybe I live a more sheltered life than you, but finding myself unexpectedly submerged is about as extreme a situation as I'm going to find myself in, and not one I plan for other than being able to swim.

Fwiw, my 2022 IP67-rated Samsung phone failed after a few mild water splashes recently. It's supposed to be resistant to 1m submersion for 30 minutes, but failed with much less water exposure.

I was stuck without essential functions until I could get it repaired or replaced. Luckily I was able to get it opened, cleaned and dried and a new screen fitted by a local repair shop within 2 days.

Without my phone, I can't pay things on my credit card sometimes (some payments require phone app 2FA), and I can't login to several of my bank accounts (they use authentication by mobile app even for web-based banking on my laptop).

I regularly wash my 2022 non-Samsung phone in the sink. It's fallen in the pool a few times. It's been in a water logged pocket a few times.

Not to suggest more gadgets are the answer, but my apple watch covers almost all of these now.

GPS, check.

Payment, check.

Lighting, check.

Car/house key, no.

Health tracker, check.

My Apple Watch will unlock my home and car.

I like my Garmin, but map updates are surprisingly expensive.

This is why I run Open Street Maps on my smartphone: OsmAnd~ gets free maps updates anytime, for life.

I'm pretty sure there was a simple OSM app for GerdaOS -- the rooted privacy a friendly version of KaiOS for the Nokia 8110 4G.

How did people manage before smartphones?

GPS: Garmin, or use a map.

Payments: use a card, or cash.

Car keys: use the keys that came with the car.

House keys: Carry them with you, or get a keypad lock.

Lights: use the switch on the wall

Health tracker: notebook and pencil

Don't forget that technology has a ratchet effect. It's gonna get worse over time.

> Payments: use a card, or cash.

The card part ends up requiring phone confirmation as a second factor, often online, occasionally offline.

> Health tracker: notebook and pencil

Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

> Convenience matters - notebook and pencil method cuts down people benefiting from health tracking by a couple orders of magnitude.

How?

Take sleep tracking: I tried and failed to note those times when I wake up. I'm usually too foggy to remember, and later in the day, it's too much effort to reverse the times out of environmental cues. Obviously, I don't have a consistent sleep schedule - otherwise, I wouldn't care about tracking it in the first place. And, of course, manual tracking doesn't work when I wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep an hour later, because half the time I don't remember it happened until next afternoon. However, my smartwatch is able to record all that for me, with 95+% accuracy, which over the past year or two gave me some important data to contextualize my day-to-day energy levels.

Or take pressure monitoring. My whole life, I've been suffering from acute chronic cannot-form-a-habit-to-save-my-life-itis, (now also known as "treatment-resistant part of my ADHD"). There's no way in hell I can stick to daily (or worse, less frequent) measurements using cuff-style upper arm monitor. It may be portable, battery-powered, trivial to use, but it's still too much of a hassle. What I can do is use it to recalibrate my smartwatch every couple weeks, and use that to take measurements - I still can't form a habit, but at least something I can do within couple seconds of remembering it. So, thanks to the watch, I get some data, where otherwise I'd have none, and that's all because of convenience factor.

Or just look at the popularity of fitness bands and watches. Some people derive value from those automatic measurements. Of those people, many (most) wouldn't otherwise bother if they had to use a stopwatch and a notebook instead.

I'm not so much interested in how difficult it is to track something as whether the data and its granularity maps out onto real change.

I went through periods of wanting to make changes in my life, and I thought it was all about figuring out a perfect system.

It turned out that the bigger problem was actually overthinking, and it was that overthinking itself which wanted more data and more methods.

In actuality, what helped was removing as much friction as possible. I have no data about my sleep except for the clear fact that I wake up earlier and spend almost no time rolling around my bed before getting out of it. I don't need either a watch or paper to tell me that.

I don't say that as a way of critiquing your methods, just wondering if you notice real, considerable change as a result, the kind that you don't need to minutely keep track of because it's so obvious.

Or to make it not personal, is there a known correlation between the popularity of fitness tracking devices and significant weight loss across populations?

What if your car key is a smartphone app or a card in your wallet? Those were the keys that came with my car.

I understand your points.

My macro point was that the smartphone introduced several very sticky conveniences, so I kept my smartphone instead of adopting a light phone or similar device. Instead, I am working on treating it as an appliance or a utility device vs. a constant extension of my arm.

For example, my two vehicles can be accessed via a smartphone key/app or a card in my wallet. So my wallet is slimmer than before, but it has a credit card, vehicle access cards, insurance, license, etc. I now carry one credit card instead of multiple physical cards since my phone wallet has several to choose from for tap to pay.

I can unlock my home remotely or via a phone tap, watch tap, physical key, passcode, or remotely. Most phone lighting controls are convenient instead of getting up and going to the switch. But the phone allows for finer-grained control of light temperatures, brightness, electrical usage, etc.

If I was determined to rid my life of a smartphone, I could sell my vehicles, buy a non-smart lock for my home, and stop tracking my workouts and diet with the phone app.

At the moment, ditching my smartphone isn't an option. I'm taking steps to treat it like any other appliance or a utility vs. an entertainment or consumption platform, which is where I believe the addictiveness lies.

Most of the time I need to turn light on when I go to another room, but then I pass by the switch anyway.

> Most phone lighting controls are convenient instead of getting up and going to the switch. But the phone allows for finer-grained control of light temperatures, brightness, electrical usage, etc.

Again, Google Home gives you most of that...

Fortunately for me, the for factor + UI of phones always sucked for me, so needing to use it for anything is a deterrent. I dislike small screens, and dislike non-physical keyboards. After decades of efficient PC usage, using a phone always feels like a speed bump.

It's good to have data on the go when needed, and good for camera. For everything else, it feels inferior. And whenever I find a really neat use for the phone, the Android Police clamp it down and break it (e.g. the AutoMagic app and automation in general).

I very often need to deal with 2fa when paying online, though I suppose a dumb phone could do.

I'm pretty sure you can deal with 2fa on Kai OS feature phones. They also include Gmail, Google maps, and WhatsApp access... on a tiny screen where you won't get sucked in for hours.

However, they also come with a ton of tracking, and are a disaster for privacy.

Sounds like just a worse smartphone.

> maybe someday I can evolve to look at the smartphone as a utilitarian device without the addictive qualities.

Good luck.

You won't though, "because sekhurity" - the trend points at everything using your phone as a second factor, and not even via the authenticator app, but vendor-specific push notifications, on a remotely attested phone. Banks and media companies are pushing hard for it.

And this in spite of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US strongly recommending against using SMS as a 2nd factor authentication since 2016!

Nobody said anything about SMS

Why yes. Because SMS isn't good enough, the sekhurity industry decided everyone needs to use apps instead, since they can communicate over SSL and are harder to spoof, and then threw in remote attestastion for extra sekhurity.

You can get a lot of those things n an Apple Watch. I like to go out with just my Apple Watch sometimes. It covers your GPS, payment, and health tracking use cases. I’m not sure if the lighting controller and house key would be covered.

> The next step will be having a designated spot for it to stay while I'm home.

Sounds like a good compromise, like a basket where you put all your keys you need when leaving home.

I think the core issue with attention is ultimately the same as with infinite scroll, and the reward mechanism.

For me the unease can be felt as soon as I unlock phone, it’s like a bunch of candies and there is this implicit feeling that you need to do something, to interact with something.

Then there is this angst like when you get physical mail and you anticipate who it might be from back when we wrote more letters. Only now with smartphones it gets repeated endlessly throughout the day.

Can we really force ourselves to slow down ? To live a simpler life ? I think it’s not possible until profound changes in our society such as basic income.

The smartphone in a sense is symptomatic of the rat race. It’s the only way we found to make things better when better is « doing more things in less time ».

As others have pointed out alternatives, you can also just ask yourself whether the convenience of those things you listed in total are worth more than the drawbacks. If you constantly lose time by mindless scrolling, if you are unable to focus anymore, if you start suffering from FOMO all the time, if you social interactions and friendships suffer etc. the question is whether the comfort of those conveniences are worth the drawbacks. And some very obvious point about that: All of the things you mentioned, you didn't have 10 years ago. Was your life that bad (becaues of the lack of those things) at that time?

> The next step will be having a designated spot for it to stay while I'm home.

I put my phone charger in a drawer by drilling a hole in the back in order to run a power cord. I found that just having the phone on silent and out of sight helps a lot.

It also helps with clutter, instead of having a ton of random devices and cables, all of that mess is in a drawer that doesn't bother me.

Pocket full of keys? Sounds like a recipe for pain. Carabiner!

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