Going Phoneless | Hacker News Reader

Going Phoneless

messyprogress.substack.com

4 pointsrobotelvis10 comments

I wanted to try this for just two weeks — my Pixel phone's battery swelled up, and the new iPhone wasn't coming out for a couple of weeks; I told my wife I'd be fine without a phone and she quickly vetoed it.

I did my usual investigation of flip phones and dumb phones; couldn't find one that ran Android or basic apps like Spotify and podcasts that I use every day *and* worked on major US cell carriers. There's some cool E-Ink phones out of China, but AFAIK they don't have full compatibility on US cell networks.

I ended up with an iPhone and I just dumb it down. Black background, installed only like a dozen apps, removed a bunch of the preinstalled ones, aggressively culled notifications.

Actually I've been thinking of removing the web browser from my iPhone. Your post inspired me to do it. Settings --> Screen Time --> Content & Privacy --> Allowed Apps, disable Safari. Let's see how I manage!

I played with disabling Safari but it's hard to sustain that because you'll often find yourself needing to open a random QR code to do something.

But I have buried it on the third page of a sub-folder, so I'm not tempted to randomly open it.

I think the most important thing is to just not /usually/ have the phone in your pocket, so you break the habit of reaching for it.

I'm interested in seeing how long I can make it. I have gotten up and left restaurants in the past when they had nothing but QR code menus. I'm sure I'll face some insurmountable obstacle at some point (e.g. on vacation in a foreign country with no laptop, and need to access a website to book tickets or find information on my phone) but I'm curious how often events like that come up and if I'd have the self-discipline to just re-disable the browser after.

I also looked at getting a flip phone but decided it wasn't really viable. Realistically you need to have an iOS or Android phone, because even if you don't need it /most/ of the time, you do need it sometimes.

The trick is to find ways to carry it with you less.

I still don't have a phone yet, and I'm glad I don't because of the distractions and radioactivity https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38783888/

Also, I hate how smartphones are a necessity in todays world, you usually need them for verification, paying bills, etc.

Cool that you were able to do that.

There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone with you most of the time, even if you own one.

Hopefully if enough people go phoneless, society will adapt to require smartphones less often.

Fortunately, so far, there is nothing that I need to do that I actually have to have a smartphone for. Hopefully that will remain true for a long while.

Hopefully. I still can't get around the fact that Apple implements AI in their phones. They're probably monitoring the information.

Apple Intelligence can be entirely disabled, I did it on both my iPhone and my Mac and it hasn't bothered me about it since.

Actually Apple seems decent with storing personal information on-device, or at least giving the user options to control it. As shown in my pi-hole, my Apple devices send way less requests to tracking and data harvesting domains compared to Microsoft and Google/Android products.

> my Apple devices send way less requests to tracking and data harvesting

Isnt that just the APIs retrying when blocked?

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