gemini://carcosa.net/journal/20211025-minimizing-phone.gmi

A while back (about a month ago), Sandra at Idiomdrottning wrote about "All a phone needs to do". Basically, a phone needs to:

I was kind of inspired by that post, and kind of ruminated on it for a while without feeling like I had any kind of response to make. Meanwhile, over the last month, I've been really distracted. Mostly not by a smartphone, actually, but by social-media-ish parts of the WWW that my work doesn't block (lobste.rs, the Great Orange Satan), because my actual work has taken a turn for the boring. But my smartphone distraction has been non-zero; in the evenings, when making dinner and so forth, or when I should be doing dishes, I've turned to a couple of endless-scroll sites for memes and the like. I am pretty down with the idea of committing to doing more things on my laptop that I currently do on my phone so that I sit down to enjoy them.

So I started looking at the modern dumb-phone market. You've got your classic dumb phones, still, mostly in flip format. They do just literally the three things above, though maybe they don't actually serve as a hotspot. Then there are a couple of high-end "minimalist" phones that may have eInk displays, and may offer one or two constrained "smart" features like navigation along with an MP3 player. They're fairly expensive, but no more than a mid-range smartphone. And then there are KaiOS phones, the successor to FirefoxOS, phones that are basically built around a web browser to offer a semi-"smart" phone experience. Notably, there's the Nokia 8110 4G, which runs KaiOS in the form factor of the classic curved phone from "The Matrix".

My problem is that I need different things at different times. I pretty much always need the things Sandra identifies. I pretty much always need an MP3 player and plenty of storage. I need a camera pretty often; often enough that I'd need to commit to carrying a dedicated camera if my phone didn't provide it.

I often need what would classically be considered "PIM" features: contacts and calendar, mainly. Grocery lists; my main to-do lists can just stay on the computer. Note capture. And I'd rather have a modern encrypted chat like Signal, Matrix, or XMPP+OMEMO and save SMS just for notifications from businesses and such, though they also open up the distraction of group chats. I need GPS navigation a lot. I could probably most of the time print out directions in advance, but I'm sure there are times it wouldn't be practical.

I also have a bunch of reading and media apps, a lot of which could be moved to the laptop along with email, but some of which, especially at home, make a lot more sense on the phone (Netflix, Jellyfin) to stream things to the dumb TV. And games I have on to let my youngest child play since they don't have their own device. And NewPipe for grabbing media to watch or listen to offline. And the various school notification apps, and the several different multi-factor authentication apps. Most of this is deeply, deeply garbage that I don't want to be tempted with or distracted by 99% of the time, but which I need to have on hand for when I need it.

If it weren't for that last category, I'm pretty sure I could get by with a KaiOS phone (the three things, plus MP3 player, plus navigation, PIM, and Converse.js) without having to go out of my way and do things like print directions before going new places. And ultimately once you have a functional modern browser, you're already past the dividing line of minimalism. But in the end, I decided to take a less drastic approach, that also didn't involve buying anything.

I decided to install a few things from F-Droid to make my phone life simpler. First, I uninstalled the infinite-scroll apps that were taking my attention, and everything else I could bear to uninstall.

I already had Monochromatic installed, which turns my screen grayscale, but I only used it at particular times before; now I have it on as the default and only turn it off for specific purposes.

I replaced my launcher with Olauncher, a minimalistic launcher that just has the names of five most-used apps on the home screen (with a wallpaper image). It offers an automatic new wallpaper every day, but I'm using my own. Boring! The other apps are available, but the app drawer is just a scrolling, searchable list of app names. There are other, even more bare-bones launchers on F-Droid, but I thought they went beyond minimal into "ugly".

I also went back to Vinyl for my local music player from Retro; not as big a change, but it seems a little less exciting visually.

In the end, I'd also like to fully de-google my phone, but I worry that these days various third-party apps (in the "garbage I need from time to time" category) wouldn't run.

Minimizing phone use (re: All a phone needs to do)

Considering a dumb-phone

Making my smart phone dumber

Apps from F-Droid