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Comment by 3036e4 | Hacker News Reader

My next phone will almost certainly be two phones. One cheap and super standard Android phone to just run banking apps and similar that insists on Google Play etc. Locked down and boring, turned off most of the time. Then a second phone for everything else (terminal with sshd, emacs, emulators, media players ... the stuff that allows a phone to be the general purpose computer it should be).

Looks increasingly unlikely that there will be convenient ways to have the best of both those worlds in a single device. For now it is somewhat possible with Android, but the experience keeps getting worse.

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After just submitting my recent post --- I do like your suggestion.

Maybe 2 phones are the way forward.

Maybe a PAYG phone which stays at home on my network for particular needs like banking.

Then a standard phone which is essentially a GNU/Linux distro.... mmm... Emacs on my phone sounds lovely!

you won't even be able to use the closed phone remotely from your main one since the restrictions wont allow remote software to see or interact with the screen

> Maybe a PAYG phone which stays at home on my network for particular needs like banking.

If you're only doing banking at home, why would you do it on such a tiny little device?

They probably mean for TAN apps

> Emacs on my phone sounds lovely!

Meanwhile, you can use it in termux if you are on android right now.

I am starting to do that but I still find that will be annoying to keep up. The dumb device will need to be kept up-to-date because that's important for e.g banking apps so that automatically excludes "old" devices (usually 3+ years old) because most stop getting updates that fast. Even LineageOS isn't an option because it does not pass Google's integrity checks so I am afraid I will need to buy a new dumb phone every couple of years..

On my to-do list is to join a local credit union after checking whether all services are available in person. All this mess is not worth simply being able to do stuff from my phone.

The trick is to never, ever install the banking app on your phone. If you only use their web app from the beginning (account creation) and say you don't have a duopoly phone, the app will not be required.

FYI, you can get a pixel 8a for $200 or less if you don't care about condition. Support end date in 2031.

Yeah, you second phone sounds like a laptop. I have a boring phone that I don't care about with basically factory settings and perhaps 3 apps. MyGov, Dropbox and something else I can't even remember right now.

And I also carry a super cool small laptop that can tether to the phone and actually do stuff with.

One is an appliance, the other is a computer.

I sometimes bring a bt keyboard to use my phone as a tiny almost-laptop, but mostly happy with something just the size and weight of a phone.

Used to have two phones ~10 years ago. A Jolla Phone was my primary phone with a sim card and ran most non-Google apps. Then I carried around a cheap Motorola Android phone that had no sim card but could run Google Play apps and when it needed wifi I shared that from the Jolla and otherwise it was fully offline and most of the time turned off.

So the phone that was closer to a small laptop was the one I actually used as a phone. Not sure if that is the setup I would go for again or if I would do it the other way around with the Google phone being the phone. If I do the latter I guess something like a very small Linux netbook would work as a second device, it such a thing exists.

I was going to say that. I carry a laptop and an iphone 13 mini. The iphone is nice in a locked down way and the laptop you can code on etc. I'm not sure I see the attraction of the non locked down phone compared to the laptop for most use cases. I guess I could location spoof pokemon go so there'd be that.

I do have an Android for one app. But daily drive linux and have since the Nokia N9/N900.

I must admit, I don't do banking on the phone and keep all sensitive data off my mobiles.

Could you maybe run a hypervisor with both operating systems? Like one does on a server?

Or will that munch your battery?

Official Android with Google Play and all the things some apps require will almost certainly refuse to run if a hypervisor is detected. Maybe someone could get it to work, but it would be a struggle to stay ahead of whatever new security checks are added to the OS and apps. The point of having one perfectly normal phone would be to not have to worry about any of that.

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