blog equipment

it's been eight months since i moved my phone number to a dumbphone. i still have a smartphone, because in 2025 in the US you are intermittently locked out of society without one, but the smartphone doesn't have a SIM card in it and i use it much less than the average person. in the last week, i had 7.5 total hours of screentime. three hours was signal messenger (mostly phone calls probably), and one hour was organic maps (driving somewhere new). next was the mail app at 40 minutes. the browser is unused because i've locked myself out of it.

what's changed?

the big change is that i moved from an AOSP phone (calyxOS) to an iphone. i am not happy with this, but to me it felt necessary after my AOSP distro entered a period of crisis and recommended that everyone uninstall it from their phones. i refuse to use grapheneOS because of the behavior of their leadership, and i personally don't think that non-android AOSP phones will remain viable for much longer. i think google will lock it down or lock everyone out somehow, whether implicitly through app store policies or otherwise. honestly AOSP phones are hardly viable for non-technical users right now anyway.

i know that engagement with linux phone has increased a lot recently. that makes me very happy, but i don't follow it or participate because it's not what i want from a phone. i don't want an open source smartphone — i want to live in a society that does not require a smartphone. at the point that i can put signal and offline maps and the stupid app from a new job on my linux phone and have them work normally, i will do that. but i don't want to need to do any of that, so i'm not gonna help us get there faster.

anyway, i hate smartphones, there is no good answer at all, so i got an iphone and put only things that i personally need on it. all the best stuff is there still: signal, delta chat, kiwix, organic maps. i followed the privacyguides.org guide to locking it down: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/ios-overview/

new experiences

drove across the state to visit the beach using only organic maps. this wasn't really a new experience, but just further affirmation that the maps setup works great

dumbphone thoughts and feelings

it's still perfect, no complaints. even did some job interviews on there. you can still buy it: https://www.agmmobile.com/products/agm-m9-rugged-4g

it does seem to drain battery quickly when in a bad service area, which is good to be conscious of. but mostly i leave it at home and treat it like a landline.

i did change my voicemail to something that plays the DTMF “number disconnected” tone (before telling the listener to leave a message), with the hope that it would get me off of some spam call lists. i get less spam than most people i know and it's still way too much. you can get the voicemail recording i made and use it yourself on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/disconnected-dtmf-voicemail

ios thoughts and feelings

i used parental controls to lock myself out of the browser. my partner made a parental control pin for me and then promptly forgot it. that wasn't the plan, but it's great. now if i ever want to get back into the browser, i'll have to do some really convoluted process with apple support. i can still use the browser for 1 minute per day in emergencies because that's just how that works on iphone.

other than that, i haven't thought about the iphone much. i've used both android and iphone over my life so they both just feel “fine”.

complet

overall this experiment is “done”, in the sense that it's not an experiment anymore, it's just how i live my life. i highly recommend this to anyone who can swing it. i'm no longer carrying a tracking device with me at all times, i've deprioritized the small screen as much as is really feasible in 2025 in the US, and i can still participate in those aspects of society which literally require a smartphone (a heinous requirement).

if you have any questions just shoot me an email :)