I Don’t Have a Smartphone…
85 points by cgrinds
85 points by cgrinds
I have never purchased a smartphone. It's really interesting how that's been received over the years. Used to be a sort of "huh? what's wrong with you?" and even among more normal audiences it's shifted a bit more towards "I wish I could do that" in the last few years.
The simpler "oh, I don't do apps" doesn't seem to shock people nearly as much; most people are over having twenty gajillion apps on their home screen.
Just in my toilet, I’m supposed to have an app for the seat, an app for the flush and one for the ventilation.
What the hell kind of toilet did you buy? :D
Sorry, your toilet is updating, you need to hold it in until it has finished rebooting and then sign in again and accept the new terms of service.
Heh, yeah, allow me to recommend the older Toto washlets, which are controlled through infrared and do not have wifi or other radio-based features. I put a lot of work into avoiding the intrusion of general-purpose computation into new areas of my life, and this is one of the ways I do that...
Yeah, my washlet is a few years old and it's just got a remote that sits on the counter next to it. That's perfectly fine by any standards I think. I'm not really sure what an app would buy me here unless I really wanted to be keeping... stats? I suppose?
yeah even as somebody with Crohn's disease who has to pay a really quite unfortunate amount of attention to my poop, statistics are the last thing I'd want
I'm so sorry you have to do that, and I'm even sorrier to say your comment made me laugh audibly.
I was going to reply to the parent saying that if you want those kinds of stats you probably either have Crohn's or an unusual fetish of some sort. But I guess I can cross Crohn's off the list of possibilities.
I'm not as extreme as having three different levels of shit-quarantine, but I do think of my mobile device as a quarantine that allows me to avoid putting some really atrocious shit on my laptop. If I somehow found a mobile I actually enjoyed using, I'd probably do a two-level thing and retain my current device as an ablative layer.
I’m somewhat confused by the fact that it was posted under "a11y". Do you think that is really how that piece should be read?
Not having a smartphone is for all intents and purposes a disability, so I believe the tag fits because the piece describes all sorts of hoops one has to jump through wrt access to banking.
That seems like a big stretch. Not having a permanent address or not having a bank account either locks you out of or makes accessing necessary services harder. But this is not generally called having a disability.
Accessibility isn't purely about access for people with disabilities. In this case it's about access for people without smartphones, or the desire for that to be possible.
Sure, I can jive with that. I just thought it sounded wrong to call not having a smartphone a disability in and of itself.
"temporary disability" is a real term referring to the fact that, for example, a mother holding a baby in her arms is as disabled in front of, say, an ATM keypad, as someone missing hands entirely.
It can work in the other direction: there are plenty of disabilities that preclude people from smartphone ownership/easy operation. The main interface is touch for input & sight/reading for output (yes, I know, both Apple and Google have barebones functionality for the visually impaired and voice interfaces).
Access to services should not necessarily be gated on such restricted devices.
I have to agree with ChisDenton. The lack of a smartphone is more an accesibility problem than a disability. Accesibility is not about disabled people but about people in uncommon situations.
I wouldn't call them uncommon. Most of us will need accessibility features at some times.
I think if I had filtered out the a11y tag, I wouldn't have intended to filter out articles like this one.
Most of us will need accessibility accommodations at some point in our lives, for a variety of reasons. Gating things behind a smartphone app is certainly an accessibility problem. I liked the tag here, and I'm disappointed that it went away based on user suggestions.
Only semi-related: I liked this post and think it deserves an update.
A notion of a compliance device is kept fresh for me.
I keep hearing how nice Mudita Kompakt is from various sources. I hope this company will be able to sustain itself for a long time.
Sadly the repo for their OS hasn’t seen an update in over a year.
MuditaOS was a very ambitious take for their Mudita Pure dumbphone.
It seems it failed so they switched to a custom Android build (Mudita OS K) for their Mudita Kompakt, which is mostly working as intented and a great phone if you don’t expect the full smartphone experience.
So don’t confuse MuditaOS (homemade Linux distribution intented for use with a keypad) with Mudita OS K (custom Anrdroid ROM)
I've deliberately started moving as much as I can toward local brick and mortar that doesn't require an app, email address, or even a phone number. My driver's license and a utility bill should be enough. Credit unions are usually pretty good about this.
I legitimately do this all the time as well by pulling out my Sailfish OS phone that doesn’t have a working camera. I got some paper menus 2 weeks ago due to it…
Funny coincidence.
Me, just yesterday in a private chat: I've sometimes thought about buying a medium old iphone (for long security update cycles) and leave it at home in a drawer, just for banking apps and other mandatory 2FA.
I'm not saying I'm not using mine, but the usage statistics are mostly:
So I guess that could be condensed to: messengers and a web browser are mandatory
I do admit that when I am on a bike tour or on vacation I take full advantage of not having to lug a laptop around.
That said, while I mostly agree, I don't seem to have this app problem in a larger sense. The aforementioned public transport app is actually good (but I suppose a logged in website would do), and the banking/2fa stuff I'd just prefer to have a dedicated device at home (it could be a phone, but I don't want to have it in my pocket all day).
How do you manage pays? I tried putting in your shoes but I can't avoid having my "virtual" bank (something like Paypal) to pay the coffee I'm drinking right now. I don't have cash (i.e. paper cash) with me ever, and my ID is a government app that works for most everyday task (expect travelling abroad).
This varies greatly by country, but in the U.S. and most of Europe, you can pay just about everywhere with a physical Visa or MasterCard credit or debit card. Not how it works in India, China, or Brazil though (for example).
I wonder how far off we are from portions of Google and/or Meta being siphoned off to be maintained / operated by the government? Because clearly it seems like the technology they have developed that gets used in the ways this article describes has realized it's full profitability, and it's become more of a public utility than anything else. (In a more extreme take, there is an enormous amount of risk involved if Google and/or Meta are out of service, like how X being down means certain public services can't post to the masses anymore, but have no alternative as they're 100% invested in X.) We have leaned way too far into this shit to go back and/or make it easier for ourselves (and it will only get worse for OP)...
It really is unacceptable that you have to have a smartphone to particpate in the world today.