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Today I Have a New Phone Arriving

2020-11-11T20:31

I see that my new phone is on board for delivery today.

I have been using an iPhone for a couple of years; an 5s and then more recently a 2016 SE.

Before that, I used an old HTC Desire and HTC Wildfire. Both were ancient. I stopped using the Wildfires because I kept dropping them, each time causing the LCD to bleed blue (this happened two or three times).

Both of these phones were running Android Froyo. They were around 8 years old at that time. All things considered, this was actually not as bad an experience as you might expect. There were a few annoying things like modern TLS cyphers prevented a lot of https sites to not load, very minimal Emoji support, and I could only receive messaging via SMS, but it was mostly good.

Running an old OS meant that I must also run old apps. Barely anything current was still supported. The Play store also didn't work, so all apps needed to be installed via their APKs, but there are a few repositories of current and historic APKs so that wasn't much of a problem. Of the few apps that I used there were two exceptions; the latest versions of MessagEase and Moon+ Reader would still run.

The other apps I used were Google Auth, Google Maps and Wunderlist.

Google Auth looked and felt right on Froyo -- I only have experience with Android up to around Jellybean, but it felt old in that version.

Google Maps worked, but I never had much trust that the next time I opened the app I wouldn't receive 404 responses.

The latest Wunderlist that ran on Froyo would work without signing in, but you lost the ability to sync. The version was also so old that the APIs it connected to had been deprecated.

The experience highlighted how much of the computing you do on your phone is actually not done on your phone anymore. If I were to try the same experiment in 2025 with a phone made in 2017 I wouldn't expect many apps would work — almost no commercial apps work offline anymore. The phone would be junk.

The last new phone I bought was in 2014. It was a Sony Xperia Z2 Compact and it sucked. I used that for 3 months. After two months the screen smashed. It didn't just crack, it ruined the digitiser rendering it useless. I had it replaced but the screen never sit flush again. I was also warned it wouldn't be water resistant anymore.

I stopped using the Z2 when I began a new job and received an iPhone 6. I used that for the next 18 months until I left. Then I went back to the Z2. It lasted another month, then the replacement screen smashed, and again it ruined the digitiser. I used a borrowed HTC Wildfire until I bought a real replacement phone. That's how I came to discover that that old phone actually wasn't so bad and decided to keep it.

Maybe a year or more later, I switched to using an iPhone. It was originally my partners phone. She left it on the roof of the car and it fell off and was ran over... many times... including by me (but that's another story). It spent a few hours on the road that day but we found it using the find-my-phone feature. The screen was shattered into a thousand pieces, but amazingly the thing was still on and working. Apple earned a lot of respect from me after that incident. One day I remembered it was still sitting in the drawer and thought about fixing it. The total bill for parts: screen, camera, fingerprint reader, battery was about $30. I was spending that on replacement Wildfires each time I dropped one. I liked that the iPhone would run the latest iOS and apps. It supported all the TLS cyphers and it wasn't Google. So I made the switch.

So that brings me back to now. I've ordered a OnePlus 6t which I intend to run MicroG on. I've grown very disappointed in Apple over the last few years and no longer want to be part of their ecosystem. It doesn't hold a charge too well anymore and I don't really want to spend time and money fixing it.

MicroG is de-googled Android. They've written compatible APIs and provide users with lot more control about what is sent to Google.

I've developed quite a few chips on my shoulder and the 6t seems to avoid most of them.

It isn't water resistant.

It has a battery that can be replaced (though it's not as easy as I would like)

It can be hacked with third-party firmware.

It isn't ridiculously expensive

But it doesn't have a mammoth replacement part market like the old iPhone has.

I also don't like how big it is. Lots of people seem to have grown accustomed to bigger phones and I'm probably not so special that I can't too, I don't know.

But today it's arriving and I'm excited.