Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
I don't use it for social media.
I think yes, since the App Store and anything involving likes/up-down votes/karma (sorry) and basically any form of reward for posting or consuming content.
But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing for my stimulated attention probably isn't healthy.
They are really cheap and some like kaechoda and other brands are really slim as well so I can recommend it genuinely.
Its worth looking more into but yes I am having an android now partially because of whatsapp and the fact that my old dumb phone had died
Rest in peace, it was really cool.
My phone has calls, SMS, MMS, email (IMAP), calendar (CDAV), contacts (CDAV), navigation (offline and Waze), note-taking, voice memos, a music player, weather, and voice-to-text via Azure's AI models. The only things I've missed so far are:
- Two-factor authentication via TOTP and HOTP. I loathe SMS-based 2FA, and not every service supports Email-based 2FA. This has been so annoying I've considered jailbreaking it, learning Kotlin and Android development, and releasing an MIT-licensed application for the company to bundle with the phone.
- A way to scan QR codes. It would be fine if I could just extract the text into a Note.
- The ability to record a call without an additional device. I've been dealing with a medical billing kerfuffle and it was much easier to disclose and press record, than to disclose and find another recording device.
- The ability to send and read SMS/MMS messages from my MacBook Pro. It should be possible with the Bluetooth HFP, which many cars use to enable the same thing. Sadly, Tunabelly Software's app "Handsfree 2" was pulled from the market and I could not get Sustainable Softworks' app "Phone Amego" to work. I've considered building a TUI for this purpose.
- At first I missed Audible, but then I learned two important facts. First, I can listen to my Audible books on my Kindle as long as I connect a bluetooth speaker (including Ford SYNC). And second, Audible and iTunes for Windows integrate with each other to allow me to burn Audible books to CDs, 80 minutes at a time.
- I really miss having O'Reilly Learning Platform. I used to listen to audiobooks on there all the time, and now I've got no good solution for it. I've replaced that time with Audible books (which are rarely about software). I still get plenty of software book reading done when I can focus my eyes on it, though.
There have also been some UX problems, which are livable:
- The camera is not extremely high quality. I've taken to borrowing my wife's iPad to take photos of my whiteboard when I need to preserve something before I erase it. It's fine for texting photos to friends, but not for document scanning.
- The music player is good for music, but not great for audiobooks and podcasts. It doesn't remember where you are in the middle of an audio file when you play it again later (which would, admittedly, be weird for music).
But the benefits have been incredible:
- I no longer stay up way too late every night pushing pixels past my peepers. Instead, I stay up way too late only some nights, reading technology books.
- I no longer browse social media, play puzzle games, or browse news headlines every time I'm bored for a few minutes. Instead, I contemplate (what my plans for tomorrow are, a recent problem I failed to solve, what that odd sound is, how pretty the clouds are, etc.).
- I no longer have to put up with Liquid Glass. (I also replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio LWS2200H and downgraded my MacBook Pro to Sequoia.)
- I no longer have to be concerned with anybody but my carrier tracking me.
- I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health. Conversations with friends and coworkers still keep me apprised of the things that are important enough to need to know. All the other crap just passes me by. Nothing is shoving headline notifications at me, and the easy moments to browse headlines have been replaced by devicelessness.
Ngl, lately it feels like some of my projects are born out of sheer aggravation more than anything else. I get the impulse.
<< I've been less aware of state, national, and world news--which has been a huge boon to my mental health.
Can confirm; this approach helped me a lot too. There is so much I can't do so being aware of its minutiae does nothing for me except make it worse. I still keep up with local news, because it is far more likely to make immediate impact.
I used public transit back in the no-phone/dumbphone era. I'm never going back. But if there were some way to ditch the rest of the smartphone....
If you want to limit screen time pain is a feature not a bug though.
We tend to forget that we didn't always have Google maps to help us, so we would ask a stranger for directions, we would have to wait before being able to call someone, etc.
Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.
You cannot get your job done if you are using a phone on which applications are not supported.
I ran across it a couple of times.
Unfortunately, my iPad Pro gets way, way, way more use. Much too addictive as a media consumption device.
The problem with smartphone is that it’s always on you wherever you go, and the temptation to use it for filling every second of boredom is just too strong.
iPads/laptops on another hand are just too bulky for carrying them around - in a minute of boredom you have to take deliberate action to go and grab it from whatever place it’s right now. From my experience, this additional barrier between you and content is a huge deterring factor.
As an anecdote, I use Brick app to lock my phone out of social media, and even tho the physical unlocking device in another corner of the same room where I’m, this works surprisingly well, because most of the time I’m just too lazy to take this action of going through unlocking procedure.
I think I'm immunized from it because I hate using smartphones, especially when I'm at home and could be doing the task on a PC with a big screen and keyboard. I have a few but just use them for practical tasks when away from home (occasional text, deliveries on porch, looking something up in the store, listening to podcasts, to do list for the day). Viewing content on a tiny screen with a minefield of things to accidentally tap? No thanks. They are great multi-function devices to replace others on the go.
A PC isn't just a smartphone with a bigger screen. I keep a bunch of things open and fully visible at the same time (file browser, text editor, terminal, smaller browser window, larger browser window, and some space for other things). This is nothing like using a smartphone. Every one of those programs is a content viewer/editor, where I set what they show. No notifications. Most of the time they're all static, showing what I chose and waiting for my command. If this is how you use your smartphone, then I stand corrected.
Also, The brain from age 4-12 is highly impressionable and quite different from 13-26.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.