That’s an option I considered. More so being a Manjaro user and Manjaro was offering them about 2 years ago. As @hydn mentions, specs weren’t great and I was not persuaded. Jolla.com was what I opted for after considering Various other ‘non-Google’ or ‘de-Googled’ phones. Jolla runds Sailfish so that will be a new learning experience.
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This isn’t per se about Phones but it is a good article and very relevant. I am in no way a power user, I don’t need to be an auto mechanic to drive a car, but I get the authors point. It was featured on DistroWatch. It is a bit long to read.
The Slow Death of the Power User
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.
This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
If you are interested, read on:
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That’s me. I don’t write a lot of original code, but I can look at many problems and figure them out; that’s why the best years of my career were as a tester and that’s where the best tools I’ve written came from, including a test harness I wrote, repeatedly reused and generated logic in additional test steps from the code in the test harness; all something I did through deductive reasoning.
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I really appreciate you sharing this article, it was an incredible read and validates a lot of the frustrations I’ve been having recently.
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I believed, that always was the case. IMO that becomes that obvious due to unprecedented widespread of complex technology. It is everywhere in our everyday life.
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Has anyone here tried Graphine OS? I read a little about it and it seems like you can isolate google in a sandbox so you can run those apps while having the privacy of the linux OS. I bought a second Pixel 7A to try it out on.
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It makes me happy and hopeful to see that so many people here view the development of smartphones so critically.
My wife and I recently had a situation where she needed information from a government agency. Unfortunately, you can only access the information now by authenticating yourself with an app and your ID card.
We really don’t like this trend and try to avoid anything related to it as much as possible.
Unfortunately, on top of that, we’re technologically behind here in Germany. Everything that comes from the government is technical junk—complicated, insecure, and incomprehensible.
If I could, I’d leave. And if I could leave, where would I go? I’m sure it’s similar in all European countries.
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I mentionned above that we were forced onto a smartphone to replace our old reliable landline phone.
I just wanted to point out that the phone I have used as my daily “portable” phone is a “dumb” cellular flip phone, which it too has more functionality than I want or use.
- LG B470
We got 2 of those in 2010. One of them is now starting to show some display deterioration, while I carry the other one every time I go out. Just las December, I switched it from Pay-as-you-Go to a post-paid monthly, because they kept hiking the call charges and they added a CDN $15 monthly charge about 2 years ago, which they never had before. Before switching to the plan, it had reached the point of buying a CDN $100 card every 2 months, which was outrageous! 
Everybody should have one of these!
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I also think it’s a very unfortunate development that everything, including government services, are becoming so dependent on apps. For example, the main authentication method here for governmental services (but also things like health insurance and healthcare) goes through an app primarily.
Fortunately, most things the government here puts out are of decent quality and quite a lot (especially recent) projects are open as well. But I’d rather have an alternative to all this digital. It’s invasive and brittle.
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So, are you saying that Germany has moved away from plastic (credit-card sized) government-issued identification cards? (i.e. driver’s license, health-card, social insurance number, pilots license, etc.?)
If so, that is absolutely insane? Hasn’t anyone there heard of
Those Apps should only be complementary facilitators, not sole-channel solutions. Otherwise, after an event like the above, or a long-duration power outage, society still needs to be able to function on government-validated identification that is not electronic!
Last year, for medical reasons, I had to give up my Driver’s license (which had the same information) for a Resident’s Photo ID card for ontario, which looks like this:
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I have not had a chance to try it yet, but am curious about it as well. I would love to hear more if you are able to give it a solid try. I currently have a Pixel 3A XL and the battery is dying. I am hesitating on getting a new phone because of the cost, forced AI features I will never want, and the shrinking amount of privacy ( I also really like my headphone jack! ).
If GrapheneOS is actually good, I’ll feel better about getting a new phone…
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Great article; thanks for sharing. What it says is so sad, but so true.
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Unfortunate! No SIM card, no way to re-activate! Bad luck!
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Ah, yes. The days that a phone was a sturdy electronic device that didn’t need updating or malware protection.
If 2G was still around, I’d probably still using one of my old ones (the one below is still in working order b.t.w.):
No hassle, no grief, just pure convenience.
When will people ever learn ?
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Back when dropping your phone meant checking if the tile was okay. I mean come on, this phone had snake, battery life, AND stability… we’ve downgraded as a society. The only update it ever needed was a new ringtone. lol
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it is the same here in the US, I have to access our VA website and they made us all get signed up with real ID which I am sure is now part of the DOGE data
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I bought a used Pixel 7A to try it on. They are saying if you don’t want to depend on google apps you can operate in fairly private. It can take a physical sim card so you can also buy cheap prepaid phones and swap out the sims. Trying to find time to get this going with a second sim I have for my hotspot first before I swap my main number over. I need to ask Verizon for a physical sim firtst though
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if we have an EMP we are going to have huge problems just functioning in general, we are so dependent on our electronics
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Speaking of all these different phones, maybe a few of us “older” guys will remember the Blackberry! I had a company assigned Blackberry, and the same company had some pretty good IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad systems. I think some of them were old enough that they were actually IBM branded. While absolutely “ancient” today, they were outstanding devices in their time, arguably even more durable and with excellent keypads.
I enjoyed both those phones and those laptops, both of which predated Android phones!
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