Dumb-ish phones: a love story

I am, for better or worse (probably the latter), incredibly disctractable. Faced with the full force of the modern internet and all its shiny attention gathering baubles, I am helpless. Which is to say I spend way too much time fiddling with my phone and I hate it.

I have tried all sorts of elaborate locking tools and processes and shear force of will and none of it has really stuck for more than a day or two. This blog is about a new and much more extreme alternative that I am quite hopeful about - making a dumb-ish phone.

Wait, What?

If you dive into the world of dumb phones, you discover that there’s a few different points on the spectrum:

• Properly dumb - the internet hasn’t been invented yet
• Feature phone - you have snake, and some cutdown version of Whatsapp, but that’s it
• Self control phone - you have a regular smartphone and you use apps and willpower to not doomscroll

My issue is that a feature phone is too useless to be a viable option, and self control phone is demonstrably - at least for me - a fun lie we tell ourselves. I need something right between those two - the dumb-ish phone that lets me do only these things:

• Do regular phone things - phone calls, SMS
• Do fancy modern messaging things - whatsapp (still, unfortunately …), Signal
• Take photos and sync them to my infra
• Listen to music
• Find stuff IRL

Very explicitly no social rubbish, and also no browser.

Introducing the dumb-ish phone

So most of the stuff that I want precludes using a feature phone, which means we need to take a smartphone, and dumb it down. After chatting with some mates I discovered the Graphene OS, which is essentially de-googleified-Android. This only works officially with the Google Pixel phones - which are particularly amenable to you unlocking the bootloader and putting other things on them. So I picked up myself a Pixel 9a, which was surprisingly cheap - it seems like lots of folks in Switzerland are getting these on a mobile plan at the moment, and then selling them immediately :shrug:. The transformation into a dumb-ish phone follows these steps:

1. Install the Google Store (which is actually sandboxed in Graphene!)
2. Use it to install core apps - whatsapp, Molly (a Signal alternative, that lets you use it on a second phone), PlexAmp (for music), Immich (for photo backup), and Fastmail (for, unsurprisingly, email), OLauncher (for a super minimal heres-a-list-of-my-5-apps launcher)
3. Uninstall the Google Store
4. Setup a second profile for daily use, disabling the ability to install apps
5. Install all the apps you want using Settings into the new profile
6. For the primary profile, change the PIN to something wildly long and complicated and put it in your password manager
7. Using adb, remove system apps - such as the browser - from the new profile
8. Switch to the new profile and set it up

And you’re done! The user profile you have can’t do anything apart from the apps you put in it, including browsing the internet. You still have the ability to use the core set of things you care about, but anything else needs you to pull your huge password for the root profile, switch back to it, reinstall the app store, and reinstall the app you want. This is already enough friction for me - so far - but if it turns out to not be enough, I can also use adb to remove the Graphene OS ‘bootstrap’ app store, as well as the browser, from the primary profile.

Mine looks like this, and the battery life of a modern phone you don’t actually use, you will notice. is also pretty great:

How’s it going so far?

… Cautiously very well? Because my phone can’t do anything, I don’t pick it up at - every couple hours to check messages, or to take a photo of the kids and their latest antics. In the evenings I’ve started reading books again, and I’ve also stopped spending so much time freaking out about the latest middle east adventurism, which, lets be honest, I personally have very little power to influence.