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Comment by eightysixfour | Hacker News Reader

I am a similar age to Geohot and I have tried to escape smartphones to a dumb phone. It didn’t work. So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.

• Surface parking in my city is all by QR code. Where there are machines, they are broken because no one cares.

• Social groups are on iMessage or RCS. RCS is not nearly as backwards compatible with MMS as it seems and you WILL get dropped silently, eventually.

• Some restaurants literally don’t have print menus (they’re expensive! QR codes are cheap!).

• Rideshare, bike rentals, etc. are all dependent on apps. Taxis are not reliable or available.

The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. When you have a smartphone you don’t realize the affordances that made it possible to be without them are disappearing.

I’m sure you can do it in a smaller place but you have to be dedicated and willing to suffer in a city.

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Similar age as well, and damn, if I could actually convince my bank to let me approve transactions with a dumbphone... The reality is just that a significant part of the modern world is contingent on carrying around a brand-name smartphone

Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost. Or if they're homeless, in which case the likelihood of their possesions getting damaged is probably much higher.

It's weird that people are sleepwalking into this single point-of-failure dystopia instead of regulating it out existence and only realize it when their phone gets damaged or lost or is glitching in some deal-breaking way.

Here's a tip, if you want people to help you out don't start with, "I don't have an smartphone..."

Instead, say a variation of "Hey, my camera's broken/the app keeps crashing on my phone. Can you help me out?" People tend to be a lot more sympathetic.

I've never had issues with the restaurant QR thing.

me:"Hey, my camera doesn't work can you help me out?"

waiter: "Sure you can take a look on my phone/use this tablet."

Like, I have to fix my phone's camera before I can park in your city? are you kidding me?

Go to your bank in person, say you're not going to have a smartphone, see what they say.

If opening a new account, pretend not to have a phone.

For a long time, but not anymore, Consumer Cellular had this fantastic “Lyft Concierge” service, where you could call a human who could 100% arrange a Lyft ride for you, even with a feature phone.

Of course it was designed for the elderly and disabled, but I loved it. There may still be third parties offering this type of service.

>So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.

Have you considered using a GNU/Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone)? There is no dependence on a megacorp and QR codes work fine. Some services might redirect you to a web app if you show them such phone.

A committed Windows user who just noted they depend on iMessages probably isn't a great prospect for your proselytizing, anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855086

I've previously tried living out of a PinePhone Pro, and if those web apps require much JS at all they're going to be in for a bad time. By benchmarks and your previous accounts, it sounds like the Librem 5 is only going to be worse from there.

But you nod towards a useful point there at the end. I've found I don't need to present ancient hardware to get some entities to provide web apps or other means, I just say something handwavy about my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy, neglecting to mention that I'm my employer. Bigger orgs aren't worth bothering with, though. You could show an airline an employee a flip phone and they aren't going to have any flexibility on the matter.

> A committed Windows user who just noted they depend on iMessages probably isn't a great prospect for your proselytizing, anyway

Thank you for your advice, but if you've been following the recent trends, more and more committed Windows users are switching to Linux. Especially among the technical audience that comments on HN. Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548437, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614197, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995030. Concerning the iMessage, there is nothing one can do here: It's a well-designed walled garden. You either embrace it or leave.

Yes, JS-heavy websites are a nightmare for most non-recent hardware. Nobody promised you that you won't have to make any compromises to fight for your freedom though.

> my phone being locked down by my employer's IT policy

This is basically lying, whereas I truly own a legitimate smartphone which they do not support - and they have to respond somehow.

My example was that specific user, if you didn't notice.

I send and receive iMessages perfectly fine on my non-iOS devices. It's doable, much more so than running ancient hardware is, but there are reasons I don't bring it up with people who haven't asked.

The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable. Maybe that's improved since then, but it was a horrendous experience.

I set the IT policy for my devices. I sleep fine saying I can't install crapware on it. It's my primary business device and that comes with sensible restrictions.

> My example was that specific user, if you didn't notice.

My argument was that the trend is new, while your link is to a 2.5-year-old comment.

> The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable.

The Pro version had a very small developer community and thus quite undeveloped software. It was discontinued for this reason.

Neither of those are dumbphones and neither resolve 90% of the problems I mentioned. I wasn't trying to get away from walled gardens or chase additional privacy, I was trying to get away from the most distracting devices ever created and to intentionally not have 24/7 access to a web browser.

My path was iOS -> LightPhone 3 -> GrapheneOS -> iOS.

The LightPhone was the right level of capability for the distraction free goal I had but it wasn't capable enough to resolve all of the things I mentioned.

The phone with GrapheneOS was an attempt at compromise. The idea was something I had enough control over that I could (in code) limit my usage on. In reality it didn't limit my usage and had issues with things like banking apps and RCS, so I was basically using a more irritating iPhone again. I went back to iOS.

What's your opinion on the Commodore phone? It runs a smartphone OS but web browsers (and social media apps) are intentionally banned for distraction reasons.

No RCS and iMessage via bridge (which effectively means no iMessage via phone number and a number of privacy concerns) makes the communication part an issue, but the rest looks nice. Preordered to see how it goes.

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