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behold to one of the most “old man yelling at cloud” posts on this site so far

obsidian says this takes 8 min to read so it takes 8 minutes to read i think

I am tired of my smartphone, I hate this stupid slab of negativity and sadness, I hate getting notifications that require my immediate attention, I hate getting bothered by Whatsapp or FB Messenger messages from my nosy relatives. I hate every social media app is a data collecting black box of horrors. and that Google collects and sucks up all that data and then uses that to send me ads of stuff I could give less of a fuck about. I hate how everything is becoming locked down, transformed into subscriptions, or simply made worse in the name of profit. I hate how modern Android looks like, and I hate the iron grip that Google has forced upon the Android project, making it very unclear if it really is open source or not.

I hate the ever-growing number of devices that no longer support bootloader unlocking. I fucking hate Play Integrity, which is this fucking DRM that forces us to use phones that are locked down or face losing access to apps. I hate how the moment I touch my bootloader and the OS, all these shitty streaming services revert back to only playing 360p video because now the stupid DRM doesn’t like the changes that I made to my phone that I own. I hate how the smartphone went from being this cool and awesome mini-computer to a stupid appliance that you cannot do anything unless it is approved by the court of Google or Apple. I shouldn’t have to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM just to reclaim control of a device that I bought and paid for. It should’ve been like that from the factory.

I hate how important the phone has become in the last two decades. Everyone is using messaging apps that only work on mobile, we listen to music on apps that are only on mobile operating systems. To find jobs we now need to fucking download the job finding app, to check our bank we now need to download the banking app which will cry the moment it sniffs out a unlocked bootloader. It is so frustrating. And sure, you can go ahead and install a custom ROM, rip out Google almost entirely, and migrate to apps that don’t lock you out because Play Integrity, but I shouldn’t need to do this at fucking all. I shouldn’t need to investigate which apps work and which apps break when I remove Google Play Services. I shouldn’t need to fuck around with Magisk configs to get a phone that passes Play Integrity, that’ll fail in a week because Google keeps playing the cat and mouse game.

I see people in /r/dumbphones talk about how great the experience of ditching the smartphone has been for them. They talk about massive free time gains after getting rid of social media and how much better their attention span has gotten. It makes me want to go and replace my smartphone with a music player, dumbphone itself, and maybe a light laptop that I can use to access stuff if I needed to. There is something pretty nostalgic when it comes to dumbphones in general, since I used to own one as a kid. I had my fare share of feature phones that I owned before getting my first smartphone: I had a Nokia slide up phone for a while, then some Alcatel QWERTY texting phone, then I moved up to a Motorola feature phone that had a camera and an SD card. I think this phone was the first one that I really used as a music player, lmao.

There was something about all these phones that made the experience with them probably more fun compared to what they actually were, and it was more about the limitations: none of these had Wi-Fi, and if I wanted to access the internet on these phones, I would have to ask my parents to give me money so I can get prepaid credit. And since I was a kid, and that prepaid credit was so expensive, it ended up creating this very strong disconnect from the Internet the moment I left my house, and it is not like smartphones where you can set them to airplane mode, and you know that you can simply turn off the airplane mode at any time. I knew the moment I went to school or somewhere outside to do errands with my parents, I wouldn’t be able to hop on the Internet until I got home, and that is if my parents would allow me to do so. I guess this made me cherish the little time I was allowed to access the internet.

I do think that the access to instant gratification available at all times is not a good thing. TikTok and short reel media based social media (like YT Shorts) is the best example for this, since it takes every queue of addictive social media design, and mixes it together to get a terrifyingly addictive app where the users often struggle to put down. I used to use YT Shorts quite extensively, because it was built in into the YouTube app. It started off by being pretty fun, and I mostly got shorts that were related to tech or science, maybe some of them about computers. After a while of scrolling however, you start seeing that the previously good content eventually gets replaced with low effort trash, peak clickbait shorts with excessive jump-cuts that are very very distracting, meanwhile that good content that you were seeing a couple hours ago has become harder and harder to find. This pretty much encourages you to keep scrolling, keep going, there is something that will be worth it at the end. And the end never arrives. And sooner or later you notice that you spent 2 hours on Shorts just scrolling though pointless videos. Try remembering the shorts you watched. Make a list of everything you remember during those two hours. Most likely you’d be like me and not remember anything. The two hours were nothing but a blur. This is why I quit Shorts and will now refuse to consume any sort of reel media, because how much time it likes to gobble up. And the worst part is, that you will not notice it at all. The modern Internet feels so fucking overwhelming. There are metric loads of shit to watch and read and do that make it so hard to keep up with anything. Memes used to last for a couple months but now barely last two or three weeks. Everything feels like it is going too fast for me to keep up, and it is exhausting. Social media certainly doesn’t help.

Right now I have removed most social media apps off my phone, yet I can still access them with the browser if I really needed to. I’d also like to get rid of both Discord and Whatsapp off my phone and use them only on my laptop or computer. Using a computer or laptop has this very intentional feeling of “okay we are sitting down and we are doing this now” compared to the phone.

I guess for now, I will keep my smartphone. Maybe reduce the amount of social media that I consume. I shall avoid phones with invasive AI built in and those that have locked bootloaders. But I know the final days of the unlockable bootloader are coming. Samsung recently started enforcing bootloader locking even on international devices, meanwhile Google takes plans to change Android to make developing ROMs much harder. It is clear that Google wants to convert Android to another closed ecosystem, where every single app on the platform has been checked and verified to run on the operating system.

Computers (including the smartphones that ran Android) used to be at the mercy of our own actions and didn’t do anything to stop what we wanted. Sure, go ahead and delete system32 on your Windows machine, it’s your computer! And I think this is why I like Linux. You can essentially ask it to shoot itself and unless it is one of those fancy read only systems, you can just type in a couple of commands that will make the system unbootable. I tried that in a Debian VM once and it is impressive how fast the VM killed itself while executing the command. I guess in other words, a Linux system is truly yours, since you can control every single little bit of the operating system. It is amazing. And it saddens me that phones cannot be like that.

Considering how worse the situation with Google trying to implement developer verification, and many other manufacturers killing off bootloader unlocking, the allure of the dumbphone grows ever so slightly, and it makes me want to go back to an era before Android and iOS was a thing. It will be a shame to lose such a versatile mini pocket computer, but maybe the gains are worth the loss. Or who knows, maybe I can try out those weird Linux phones that I been seeing around. I seen how Waydroid works, and to be honest, it works great. There is also a build of Ubuntu Touch for this phone, which I honestly considering trying out, just to see the state of things.