Ugh, Smartphones Again

I haven’t owned a smartphone for nearly ten years, and I haven’t missed them one bit. I consider them to be dangerous for multiple reasons, some practical and some spiritual. Their widespread adoption is one of the sadder developments I’ve been witness to.

My friends are all terminally online, though, and they consider my refusal silly or dramatic. This never really mattered until just recently, when they decided to stop communicating via SMS/MMS for security reasons. I understand completely--some of my friends are at-risk for depredations from the new government, and they need to be kept safe.

But the thought of getting another Slab of Doom is depressing and mildly nauseating. I don’t have an Apple or Google account--and refuse to get one--so I’ll need to source a ROM that doesn’t require any of that, and cheap compatible hardware and bootloaders and launchers and apps and a Signal account and...just more fussy techno-bullshit that adds no value to my life.

It’s not that I can’t do this. It just makes me sick that I have to.

Replies

Until recently I used a cheap ($150 USD) Motorola smartphone without a Google account (stock ROM). You don't actually have to log in on Google Android, at least on some devices/versions (this was 11/12). Hope that helps a bit. I actually got an Android (AOSP) dumb/feature phone recently but I have not been able to get Signal to work on that, so I am still dependent my old phone (the aforementioned Motorola) for some things.

If you are in the US (at least), make sure that whatever phone you end up buying and ROM you end up installing (and that specific combination, sigh...) has functioning VoLTE on your carrier or you will be in for an unpleasant surprise.

While not directly related, smartphone adoption at a very young age by kids often leads to negative mental effects on them. Furthurmore, even in teens [and this is not a fault of Internet or smartphone per se], many folks are on social networks where other people just post the best versions of themselves and normal people compare their ordinary lives with the picture perfect images shown on social media leading to feelings of deficiency.

The obvious question is, if they are feeling that communications are insecure because of government repression, why are they moving *towards* instead of *away from* insecure, coercive, corporate, in sum, silicon-valley-dominated technology?