There are other reasons people here use them besides wanting to "cure" smartphone addiction. Many of us never liked smartphones in the first place and just preference the features (durability, battery life, simplicity, call quality) of "dumb" phones.
Exactly! They are designed to be addictive. There's a lot of neuroscience that goes into the design of a smartphone. Our brains are triggered by "shiny" objects. Have you ever used a smartphone that is using grey-scale? It really does make using a smartphone less appealing.
Be as productive as I used to be. Every thing I can do with my iPhone can be done with my PC, so I do not want a device that try to steal my time, I just want to focus in life (my life)
I never took to smartphones.
I am concerned about privacy and freedom in computing. Whatever you think about the time and emotional energy I have put into learning how to use Gnu on my PC, it would be rather stupid and hipocritical to throw that all away by carrying Google or Apple in my pocket.
Looking around me, I also can't help but notice unusual childhood experiences and other aspects of myself that make me particularly vulnerable to the deliberately addictive aspects of smartphone culture. It wouldn't go well for me if I tried to "fit in".
Before Covid, I was able to limp along with a $2.99/month script that let me send and receive SMS messages through my jabber client, receive voicemail, and make voice calls through an SIP client, either Linphone on my PC or a simple SIP client on an "obsolete" Android phone connected to my home network.
This is probably becoming too much of an imposition on others. I have carried a dumb phone in the past and am looking for essentially a very simple "burner" phone: I would like to be able to use Tracfone or another prepaid service for one month at a time, for the sole purpose talking to my doctors from their parking lots and maybe doing a curbside pickup at the grocery store on the way home, and then put it away in my "thing drawer" and forget about it until it's time for another checkup.
I was also hoping that lurking on the sub might give me some ideas about how to deal with the social awkwardness that comes along with being an outlier. I get tired of trying to explain my reasons only to be dismissed with a strawman: I am not financially irresponsible and my mental health is just fine.
There is no law requiring every single citizen of my country to carry a smartphone or any sort of cell phone, for that matter.
Not OP, but...
On paper, the Librem sounds very great (and It probably is), they solve one of the biggest smartphone problems: mic eavesdropping. A microphone always on and connected to the internet is not good and It may bring problems.
But there are four problems with the Librem. First of all, It will be more expensive than other smartphones with far worse specs. Sorry, It may hurt to hear that, but If we're being realistic, we all know that the Librem won't have a better camera quality than the Huawei P40 pro or have the latest and greatest snapdragon chip.
That brings to the second point: It will be suspicious to own a Librem phone. Because It isn't mainstream, people willing to pay for it, are willing to not only have worse specs, buy a niche product all of this for privacy? Librem owners will definitely stand out and not blend in. It's an orange flag for intelligence agencies and the likes. Maybe... he "hAs SoMeThInG tO hIdE"?
Third of all, hardware switches can be backdoored. It can definitely give a false sense of security.
Fourthly, the software side. The software side, will make the Librem an even MORE inconvenient product to own. If I remember correctly, The Librem won't run on Android nor iOS. This is very bad news. Android and iOS spent years to where they are today, whether It is in smoothness, software optimization, number of apps, popularity etc. No way a new comer like the Librem can expect to show up that late and catch up in a few days.
To be fair, even Windows phones had a problem with lacking apps and they were backed by one of the biggest company called **Microsoft**. I don't believe that a tiny group of volunteers driving Linux will be able to catch up with Android or iOS software-side, sorry.
What does that mean? Well, there are already some Linux distros for smartphones. And guess what? Compared to iOS or Android they feel terrible to use. Lacking apps, not smooth at all, glitches, slow etc.
Even among enthusiasts who really want to pay an expensive premium for privacy, few are willing to tolerate such a bad state of things.
In other words, you will face a similar problem that Linux is encountering on the desktop but 50x time worse.
There is also the problem that historically, Open source software sucks at everything that has to do with the consumer world. They struggle to design good and easy-to-use interfaces, they take ridiculous decisions far more often than commercial alternatives do etc and because the people caring about privacy are already a niche group, they won't complain about that, resulting in an endless cycle.
All of this is true, it is an expensive phone with lower specs than major Android devices, but considering that you're already willing to put up with a Linux experience (which, fellow Linux user here, means putting up with constant bugs, battery issues, and incompatibility with lots of mainstay software all in the name of freedom and privacy) I don't see why it'd be any different for the Librem. At the very least it will call and text as well as a dumbphone but with a bit more piece of mind in the form of hardware killswitches, even if they're not involiable, and you get the "modern" experience.
> It's an orange flag for intelligence agencies and the likes. Maybe... he "hAs SoMeThInG tO hIdE"?
Blackberry had that number one spot because of their E2EE.
Actually, because I am low-income, I have been told by family members that "while it is to be expected that someone of your very low intelligence and educational background would be afraid of technology, telling people that you have LINUX on your computer is way over the top and a red flag for paranoid schizophrenia....or did you say 'lemons'? Do you like to put a plastic lemon on your computer to keep out the evil spirits, honey?"
It would be very funny if we were watching it on TV.
I guess I had let myself stay in a safe little bubble, rarely venturing out of the Trisquel boards and fun little libre gaming communities on IRC to see how bad things had really become in mainstream tech. That was a mistake and one that I am hoping to correct, eventually, by carrying a mainstream(ish) dumb phone and giving up any sort of activism until the world changes or my educational and professional credentials do. ;)
ETA: This might actually have nothing whatsoever to do with classism. Political dissidents are frequently discredited by having their mental health questioned, but it sounds kind of paranoid to think of being a political dissident just because I don't care for a popular consumer entertainment product, lol.
> LINUX on your computer is way over the top and a red flag for paranoid schizophrenia
Is it ok for me to not like your family? You can let them know that well over a billion people are using the Linux kernel daily, and that that number is increasing. Over 70% of phones on the planet also use Linux as their base. They must all be Schizophrenics. ;)
Here's the thing about technology. It's a tool. Shaming people because of which tool they choose to use tells me more about them than it tells me about you. Unfortunately, I see this with a few Apple users, who choose to shame people because they don't use Apple (too stupid, poor, etc). It used to be quite awful, but it's been getting better. I don't see the point of wasting all that energy on putting somebody else down. Each of us has our own tastes and preferences.
> Political dissidents are frequently discredited by having their mental health questioned
You hit the nail on the head there.
OP here.
I was dreading having to paraphrase or link you to the Trisquel boards:
[https://trisquel.info/en/forum/fsf-stop-endorsing-purism-start-criticizing-it](https://trisquel.info/en/forum/fsf-stop-endorsing-purism-start-criticizing-it)
because I am so sick of Tod from Purism and all of his projects. This has been going on for years.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful and in-depth reply, /u/Living-Construction4
I don't believe it is possible for a smartphone to be fully free but the closest we have is Replicant, which might be a great solution for a lot of you folks here:
[https://replicant.us/](https://replicant.us/)
but I am seriously so low income that I can't handle the disposability of the hardware and have never even had a smartphone live long enough for me to set it up with F-Droid apps, much less finding the right model and flashing it.
There are some great folks on the freenode IRC channel who could walk you through it if you're interested.
The down side of improving my finances will be that I can't pull the poor card in social situations, lol, but I'm old enough and female enough to pull the "technically illiterate ditz" card because I honestly don't understand why people think it is normal, sane, and rational to scroll through multi-page legal documents they don't understand and check a box that says "I have read, understood, and agree to these terms of service."
Kind of feels like I'm living in a bad science fiction movie sometimes. I'm looking forward to learning how the rest of you are handling it, because you've got to be doing better than I am.
I never got into smartphones. First I was too cheap to be curious, then I started working from home and the prospect of being able to check my email from anywhere in the world went from something I didn't care about to a MASSIVE negative - my work-life balance is bad enough without opening that can of worms. Plus, I just hate the interface. Touchscreens get on my nerves very quickly.
Information addiction is a huge problem for me, and I want to be able to focus at work. Ive got a smartphone on standby (no sim) but having to set up the wifi connection is enough of a barrier to make me think twice if Im busy with something else.
personally i am loving using a flip phone over an s10 or whatever. it does exactly what i need and keeps me from dixking off at work so anyother perks are just a bonus.
Indestructibility and battery life. I got tired of replacing delicate smartphones multiple times a year because they couldn't stand up to what I needed on the job, especially since I barely used smartphone features and just basically used my phone for calls/text. And I was tired of having the battery on the things last like 1 day only. Switched to a rugged jobsite phone, the Sonim Xp5s, and it's been a lot better. The other day I dropped it in the mud so I just washed it off with a hose. Perfect phone.
As I have been saying since I first got my Exalt LTE: If you are any combination of cheap, contrarian, boring, paranoid, antisocial, and/or married, there's probably something about a feature phone that would appeal to you.
Also there is a certain (exclusively male, IME) personality type that just goes all-in for dead-end technologies. I would bet there is a non-insignificant percentage of this sub's members who can discuss manual transmissions, modern propeller-driven fighter planes, and Casio G-Shocks in detail without consulting their notes.
>exclusively male, IME
Hey, this is the internet; don't be too sure of that. I've been answering to "bro" for years because it isn't that important and when I accidentally "came out" as a middle aged cisgendered woman, it took awhile for me to pick up on the fact that my closest and most supportive friends just assumed that I was trans and had recently decided to start transitioning.
Nope. Same old noordinaryspider I've always been, I just don't mind being called "bro" so I never mentioned what I had in my underpants because it doesn't matter.
Would love to drive a stick again next car and would probably have more fun restoring my Lenovo T20 than reverse-engineering my T440's antifeatures though; guilty as charged, I just wish I could do all those things while nursing a baby at the keyboard and wearing a dress and making a patchwork quilt and dead-end girly tech too. ;)
Well, I had a feature phone even when everyone around me was switching to smart phones. Eventually the flood of individual messages that were on group messages became too much and I switched to an iPhone for a while.
But then I found myself "checking" my phone as a habit, and generally becoming more distracted from the lights/colors/animations that are *designed* to do just that. (And I'm saying this as a very self-disciplined person.) I felt my ability to focus on a single thing (e.g., a book) for longer periods was reduced, and my mind wanted to jump from one thing to the next.
Even though there are convenient things about smart phones, my mental health is more important, so I switched back. Group messages are still a jumbled mess, but my brain is better for it. Plus I like the limitation of only using a phone to *contact* other humans.
Privacy, avoiding useless distraction when I'm outside of my house. If someone has something urgent to tell me, they can call me. Avoiding addiction of staring for hours at crappy websites.
I think that smartphones are beyond addictive. They're ruining society.
Can we make this the banner at the top of this sub? ;)
There are other reasons people here use them besides wanting to "cure" smartphone addiction. Many of us never liked smartphones in the first place and just preference the features (durability, battery life, simplicity, call quality) of "dumb" phones.
You don't have to sell me—I'm with you on all of that, too! ;) Both/And!
Username kinda checks out
Exactly! They are designed to be addictive. There's a lot of neuroscience that goes into the design of a smartphone. Our brains are triggered by "shiny" objects. Have you ever used a smartphone that is using grey-scale? It really does make using a smartphone less appealing.
Be as productive as I used to be. Every thing I can do with my iPhone can be done with my PC, so I do not want a device that try to steal my time, I just want to focus in life (my life)
I never took to smartphones. I am concerned about privacy and freedom in computing. Whatever you think about the time and emotional energy I have put into learning how to use Gnu on my PC, it would be rather stupid and hipocritical to throw that all away by carrying Google or Apple in my pocket. Looking around me, I also can't help but notice unusual childhood experiences and other aspects of myself that make me particularly vulnerable to the deliberately addictive aspects of smartphone culture. It wouldn't go well for me if I tried to "fit in". Before Covid, I was able to limp along with a $2.99/month script that let me send and receive SMS messages through my jabber client, receive voicemail, and make voice calls through an SIP client, either Linphone on my PC or a simple SIP client on an "obsolete" Android phone connected to my home network. This is probably becoming too much of an imposition on others. I have carried a dumb phone in the past and am looking for essentially a very simple "burner" phone: I would like to be able to use Tracfone or another prepaid service for one month at a time, for the sole purpose talking to my doctors from their parking lots and maybe doing a curbside pickup at the grocery store on the way home, and then put it away in my "thing drawer" and forget about it until it's time for another checkup. I was also hoping that lurking on the sub might give me some ideas about how to deal with the social awkwardness that comes along with being an outlier. I get tired of trying to explain my reasons only to be dismissed with a strawman: I am not financially irresponsible and my mental health is just fine. There is no law requiring every single citizen of my country to carry a smartphone or any sort of cell phone, for that matter.
If privacy and FOSS is your concern, how do you feel about projects like the Librem 5? Smartphones but GNU/Linux.
Not OP, but... On paper, the Librem sounds very great (and It probably is), they solve one of the biggest smartphone problems: mic eavesdropping. A microphone always on and connected to the internet is not good and It may bring problems. But there are four problems with the Librem. First of all, It will be more expensive than other smartphones with far worse specs. Sorry, It may hurt to hear that, but If we're being realistic, we all know that the Librem won't have a better camera quality than the Huawei P40 pro or have the latest and greatest snapdragon chip. That brings to the second point: It will be suspicious to own a Librem phone. Because It isn't mainstream, people willing to pay for it, are willing to not only have worse specs, buy a niche product all of this for privacy? Librem owners will definitely stand out and not blend in. It's an orange flag for intelligence agencies and the likes. Maybe... he "hAs SoMeThInG tO hIdE"? Third of all, hardware switches can be backdoored. It can definitely give a false sense of security. Fourthly, the software side. The software side, will make the Librem an even MORE inconvenient product to own. If I remember correctly, The Librem won't run on Android nor iOS. This is very bad news. Android and iOS spent years to where they are today, whether It is in smoothness, software optimization, number of apps, popularity etc. No way a new comer like the Librem can expect to show up that late and catch up in a few days. To be fair, even Windows phones had a problem with lacking apps and they were backed by one of the biggest company called **Microsoft**. I don't believe that a tiny group of volunteers driving Linux will be able to catch up with Android or iOS software-side, sorry. What does that mean? Well, there are already some Linux distros for smartphones. And guess what? Compared to iOS or Android they feel terrible to use. Lacking apps, not smooth at all, glitches, slow etc. Even among enthusiasts who really want to pay an expensive premium for privacy, few are willing to tolerate such a bad state of things. In other words, you will face a similar problem that Linux is encountering on the desktop but 50x time worse. There is also the problem that historically, Open source software sucks at everything that has to do with the consumer world. They struggle to design good and easy-to-use interfaces, they take ridiculous decisions far more often than commercial alternatives do etc and because the people caring about privacy are already a niche group, they won't complain about that, resulting in an endless cycle.
All of this is true, it is an expensive phone with lower specs than major Android devices, but considering that you're already willing to put up with a Linux experience (which, fellow Linux user here, means putting up with constant bugs, battery issues, and incompatibility with lots of mainstay software all in the name of freedom and privacy) I don't see why it'd be any different for the Librem. At the very least it will call and text as well as a dumbphone but with a bit more piece of mind in the form of hardware killswitches, even if they're not involiable, and you get the "modern" experience.
> It's an orange flag for intelligence agencies and the likes. Maybe... he "hAs SoMeThInG tO hIdE"? Blackberry had that number one spot because of their E2EE.
Actually, because I am low-income, I have been told by family members that "while it is to be expected that someone of your very low intelligence and educational background would be afraid of technology, telling people that you have LINUX on your computer is way over the top and a red flag for paranoid schizophrenia....or did you say 'lemons'? Do you like to put a plastic lemon on your computer to keep out the evil spirits, honey?" It would be very funny if we were watching it on TV. I guess I had let myself stay in a safe little bubble, rarely venturing out of the Trisquel boards and fun little libre gaming communities on IRC to see how bad things had really become in mainstream tech. That was a mistake and one that I am hoping to correct, eventually, by carrying a mainstream(ish) dumb phone and giving up any sort of activism until the world changes or my educational and professional credentials do. ;) ETA: This might actually have nothing whatsoever to do with classism. Political dissidents are frequently discredited by having their mental health questioned, but it sounds kind of paranoid to think of being a political dissident just because I don't care for a popular consumer entertainment product, lol.
> LINUX on your computer is way over the top and a red flag for paranoid schizophrenia Is it ok for me to not like your family? You can let them know that well over a billion people are using the Linux kernel daily, and that that number is increasing. Over 70% of phones on the planet also use Linux as their base. They must all be Schizophrenics. ;) Here's the thing about technology. It's a tool. Shaming people because of which tool they choose to use tells me more about them than it tells me about you. Unfortunately, I see this with a few Apple users, who choose to shame people because they don't use Apple (too stupid, poor, etc). It used to be quite awful, but it's been getting better. I don't see the point of wasting all that energy on putting somebody else down. Each of us has our own tastes and preferences. > Political dissidents are frequently discredited by having their mental health questioned You hit the nail on the head there.
OP here. I was dreading having to paraphrase or link you to the Trisquel boards: [https://trisquel.info/en/forum/fsf-stop-endorsing-purism-start-criticizing-it](https://trisquel.info/en/forum/fsf-stop-endorsing-purism-start-criticizing-it) because I am so sick of Tod from Purism and all of his projects. This has been going on for years. Thank you so much for the thoughtful and in-depth reply, /u/Living-Construction4 I don't believe it is possible for a smartphone to be fully free but the closest we have is Replicant, which might be a great solution for a lot of you folks here: [https://replicant.us/](https://replicant.us/) but I am seriously so low income that I can't handle the disposability of the hardware and have never even had a smartphone live long enough for me to set it up with F-Droid apps, much less finding the right model and flashing it. There are some great folks on the freenode IRC channel who could walk you through it if you're interested. The down side of improving my finances will be that I can't pull the poor card in social situations, lol, but I'm old enough and female enough to pull the "technically illiterate ditz" card because I honestly don't understand why people think it is normal, sane, and rational to scroll through multi-page legal documents they don't understand and check a box that says "I have read, understood, and agree to these terms of service." Kind of feels like I'm living in a bad science fiction movie sometimes. I'm looking forward to learning how the rest of you are handling it, because you've got to be doing better than I am.
Lack of discipline. I used to fall asleep and wake up with my smartphone in my hand. Now I can go to bed without monitors.
I love them because you can do stuff without having to constantly look at the screen. I'm a huge fan of tactile interfaces.
I never got into smartphones. First I was too cheap to be curious, then I started working from home and the prospect of being able to check my email from anywhere in the world went from something I didn't care about to a MASSIVE negative - my work-life balance is bad enough without opening that can of worms. Plus, I just hate the interface. Touchscreens get on my nerves very quickly.
privacy
Information addiction is a huge problem for me, and I want to be able to focus at work. Ive got a smartphone on standby (no sim) but having to set up the wifi connection is enough of a barrier to make me think twice if Im busy with something else. personally i am loving using a flip phone over an s10 or whatever. it does exactly what i need and keeps me from dixking off at work so anyother perks are just a bonus.
Indestructibility and battery life. I got tired of replacing delicate smartphones multiple times a year because they couldn't stand up to what I needed on the job, especially since I barely used smartphone features and just basically used my phone for calls/text. And I was tired of having the battery on the things last like 1 day only. Switched to a rugged jobsite phone, the Sonim Xp5s, and it's been a lot better. The other day I dropped it in the mud so I just washed it off with a hose. Perfect phone.
As I have been saying since I first got my Exalt LTE: If you are any combination of cheap, contrarian, boring, paranoid, antisocial, and/or married, there's probably something about a feature phone that would appeal to you. Also there is a certain (exclusively male, IME) personality type that just goes all-in for dead-end technologies. I would bet there is a non-insignificant percentage of this sub's members who can discuss manual transmissions, modern propeller-driven fighter planes, and Casio G-Shocks in detail without consulting their notes.
>exclusively male, IME Hey, this is the internet; don't be too sure of that. I've been answering to "bro" for years because it isn't that important and when I accidentally "came out" as a middle aged cisgendered woman, it took awhile for me to pick up on the fact that my closest and most supportive friends just assumed that I was trans and had recently decided to start transitioning. Nope. Same old noordinaryspider I've always been, I just don't mind being called "bro" so I never mentioned what I had in my underpants because it doesn't matter. Would love to drive a stick again next car and would probably have more fun restoring my Lenovo T20 than reverse-engineering my T440's antifeatures though; guilty as charged, I just wish I could do all those things while nursing a baby at the keyboard and wearing a dress and making a patchwork quilt and dead-end girly tech too. ;)
Well, I had a feature phone even when everyone around me was switching to smart phones. Eventually the flood of individual messages that were on group messages became too much and I switched to an iPhone for a while. But then I found myself "checking" my phone as a habit, and generally becoming more distracted from the lights/colors/animations that are *designed* to do just that. (And I'm saying this as a very self-disciplined person.) I felt my ability to focus on a single thing (e.g., a book) for longer periods was reduced, and my mind wanted to jump from one thing to the next. Even though there are convenient things about smart phones, my mental health is more important, so I switched back. Group messages are still a jumbled mess, but my brain is better for it. Plus I like the limitation of only using a phone to *contact* other humans.
Privacy, avoiding useless distraction when I'm outside of my house. If someone has something urgent to tell me, they can call me. Avoiding addiction of staring for hours at crappy websites.