Ditching My iPhone for a Flip Phone Made Me See How Useless Smartphones Can Be

Sunday night before last, I was lying in bed and looking at my Screen Time stats as I do every Sunday night. This weekly review is meant to help me keep an eye on my phone use and identify problems before they balloon out of proportion. My stats for that Sunday night were the same as they have been for many Sunday nights in a row: average time 1 hour 50 minutes, average pickup count 85 per day.

Those stats have always frustrated me. There is no reason to spend two hours per day on my phone when there is an entire world full of friends and loved ones and fun to enjoy. And since I’ve deleted all my social media accounts, games, and everything else off my phone, there’s not even anything to do on my phone. Yet every week, that average daily consumption of 2 hours stared annoyingly back at me.

And what was I doing on my phone? Half an hour total on my to-do list, half an hour total on Blinkist, forty-five minutes total on my web browser, an hour total on Discord… I was puttering around, the exact thing I hate the most in myself.

That Sunday night, I said, “Fuck it. I’m done watching myself lose 14 hours a week to puttering around on my phone. I’m getting a flip phone.”

What We Use Smartphones for Isn’t Smart

We characterize smartphones as handy multi-function tools — but like the multi-function swiss army knife your grandfather got you for your 14th birthday, most of the functions of a smartphone are not really all that functional.

The obvious

I think by now we’ve established in popular culture that social media is bad for you, especially on mobile, and so are phone games and other apps of that kind. I won’t belabor those arguments any more here.

Suffice to say: Using your smartphone to constantly check your likes and your video game army's status is a decision that will not benefit any of your bottom-line goals in life. If you want to live your dreams before you die, you’ve gotta get off your phone.

Tracking data that doesn’t need to be tracked

For as long as I can remember, I’ve used my smartphone to track a variety of things:

• What medications I take and when I take them
• My mindfulness minutes every day
• The distance I travel on my semi-not-regular walks
• What the scale says when I step on it at the end of a workout

Do you know how many times I’ve gone back and reviewed any of this data, let alone used it to come to meaningful conclusions? None.

Sure, I was pretty excited when I finally hit 130 lbs. after weeks of weightlifting. And I was pleased with myself when Apple Health told me my mindfulness minutes rose above an average of 10m per day. And of course, any day my Apple Watch told me my activity ring closed was a good day. But I spent a combined $1,500 on these smart devices, and all they gave me was an occasional happy feeling upon review.¹ If anything is a terrible return on investment, that’s it.

And of course, there’s the time cost. According to my phone, I spent at least thirty minutes a day opening apps and logging these ultimately meaningless statistics. (I would never have guessed it was that long, but Screen Time does not lie). That’s 14 hours a month just on purposeless data logging.

Smartphones allow us to measure everything, but data is only useful if it provides value over the long term. Data that provides no value is junk.

Answering questions that don’t need to be answered

Web browsers are one of the most amazing aspects of a smartphone. The entire internet is accessible to us from our pockets. All the knowledge of humanity is accessible to us at any time.

Sometimes that’s a bad thing. Like when you’re falling asleep at night, and you suddenly wonder what Macchu Pichu looks like from space, and you wake yourself up to stare into the bright light of your phone to Google it. Or like when you realize, while halfway through significant work you need to do, that you can’t remember the name of that DiCaprio movie about bank fraud or whatever, and you have to know right now. These are not great times to have the entire internet in your pocket.

Smartphones are particularly treacherous for me in this respect. I’m prone to treating free-floating anxiety by asking Google what I should do. I will type into Google questions like “is it okay that my boyfriend said x during a fight” or “why does my left ankle hurt all the time” knowing full well that the internet can’t answer these questions for me. What I’m looking for when I do this is emotional reassurance or solidarity, but all my smartphone can give me is Yahoo Answers.

The internet is an amazing thing, but it isn’t the answer to every question.

Trying to be productive in an unproductive environment

Smartphones are often touted as productivity devices. There is an entire section on every app store devoted to productivity apps, ranging from humble to-do lists to complex website management or change-commitment apps. An app on my iPhone allowed me to draft, edit, and produce an entire ready-for-print book on my phone. Thanks to the iPhone 12 Pro, there are even apps that allow people to make feature-length movies on their phones.

No doubt about it, these are engineering marvels. But before they existed, was anyone really thinking, “man, I wish I could draft and produce an entire book on my phone”? Was anyone thinking, “If only I could produce my entire feature-length film on my phone”? No, they weren’t. Even with these apps, it’s still far easier to make these things on a desktop environment.

That’s because while phones have been optimizing for speed, portability, and convenience, desktop environments have been optimizing for performance. You can be productive on a phone, but as anyone who has ever tried to run a company from their phone can attest, doing anything important on a phone takes far longer than it does on a computer.

As I’ve seen in my own life, even humble productivity apps can be a problem. There were plenty of times I was sitting around the house, in the car, with friends, or otherwise occupied by interstitial time that I decided to “be productive” by rearranging tasks on my to-do list. Was doing so productive? Yes, marginally. Was it worth dropping out of the present moment for 3–5 minutes? Hell no. If I’d waited until I was at my computer working, the same action would have taken twenty seconds, and I would have actually crossed some stuff off the list. (Oh, and I wouldn’t have missed out on time with my friends and loved ones in the process.)

As u/indxgold said:

“Anything that can be done on a computer should be done on a computer.”

Dumb Phones Aren’t So Dumb Anymore

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if smartphones were the only kid on the block, but they’re not. Feature phones are and have always been a serious contender in the mobile phone market.

In developed nations, we tend to think everyone everywhere owns a smartphone and that feature phones are as dead as the buggy whip, but that’s a conceit of the wealthy. In 2019, 58% of all phone sales were feature phones.² Most of those phones are sold in Africa, India, and Latin America, where a smartphone's price is prohibitively high compared to local income rates. This market is slated to buy billions of feature phones over the next few years.

To serve this market, manufacturers have been innovating. The most exciting of their innovations is an operating system called KaiOS, an HTML-5 based operating system designed to run on the modest hardware of feature phones. KaiOS supports Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Google Maps, Google Assistant, Google Mail, Google Calendar, YouTube, and even comes with its own app store. It can’t do as quite much as a smartphone, and it isn’t quite as user-friendly (given it runs on $30 phones), but it easily covers all the basics. And whatever basics it doesn’t cover, the browser can handle in a pinch.

KaiOS is virtually unknown in developed nations, but it is running on hundreds of millions of devices. In India, KaiOS is the second most popular mobile operating system, behind Android and ahead of iOS. Even in the US, KaiOS quietly powers over a million phones. When I went in to buy my flip phone, the customer service rep told me they sell so many KaiOS flip phones that they have trouble keeping them in stock.

It’s no surprise. Quite honestly, my KaiOS flip phone is knocking it out of the park. The phone is $60, but I can tell, “take me home,” and it generates turn-by-turn directions as readily as a smartphone would. It doesn’t announce the turns to me, but hey, it’s a flip phone that costs $60. The voice dictation is also excellent for composing text messages and placing phone calls, bypassing the T9 keyboard. Not that I’d need to, because thanks to modern tech, T9 predictive typing is pretty predictive. Sure, texting is harder on a T9, but it’s not so hard it’s impossible.³

KaiOS devices have their drawbacks, of course. YouTube looks terrible on a 2.5" screen, and the photo quality of the AT&T Cingular Flip IV is garbage. Using the browser is as laborious as it always has been on a feature phone. But I bought this phone precisely because I don’t want to laze around watching YouTube, taking narcissistic selfies, and reading Psychology Today, so these are no loss for me. The near-indestructibility and $60 price tag more than make up for it.

Premium KaiOS phones even offer features like 4G LTE and 5G service, month-long battery lives, and mobile wi-fi hotspots, making them a perfect fit for the modern city-dweller or adventurer.⁴ Feature phones settle surprisingly well into 21st-century life.

We Overlook How Much Smartphones Cost

If this were a choice between two equally-priced alternatives, I can see why many people would go with the smartphone. The fact that you’re never going to piss away 3–6 hours of your life on a KaiOS-powered feature phone and the battery will never die is a strong selling point, but the flexibility of a smartphone is unparalleled. But damn, are they expensive.

We overlook how expensive they are because we consider it one of the costs of modern life, like owning a car or a computer, but they are absolutely not a mandatory cost. This is great news because smartphones are expensive as hell.

Consider a smartphone owner over 5 years. Let’s assume they get a new phone at the start of year 1 and year 3. Let’s assume they get a mid-market Samsung, iPhone, Google Pixel, or other brand-name smartphone for $699. Let’s add a $149 protection plan, bringing the total for each phone to $848. Multiply by two phones for $1696. Let’s also assume they crack their screen once in that five years and drop their phone in water once as well, adding two service charges of $150, bringing the total cost of ownership to $1996 over five years.

The cost to purchase a feature phone is, at most, $150. The $150 feature phones basically never break. $50 feature phones may break, so if you break two or three of them, that’s $150, making your total cost of ownership in either case… $150. That’s $1846 still in your pocket for that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome. All you had to sacrifice was social media on the go and group chats for memes.

That’s not to say it’s always foolish to buy a smartphone. But if you’re a regular consumer of smartphones, you need to be at least aware of the choices you’re making.

Most smartphone consumers aren’t. They just buy smartphone after smartphone, unaware they’re spending a small fortune for the luxury of playing 2048 while they poop.

In Conclusion

Many people are asking me both online and in-person why I bought the iPhone 12 mini only to turn around and buy a flip phone. The answer is straightforward: I didn’t know my patience was going to break.

Before being at the end of my rope with Screen Time, I had no idea KaiOS existed. I thought feature phones still didn’t have Google Maps, which is a non-negotiable requirement for me. Since my desktop environment has to be Mac for work reasons (another non-negotiable), I figured if I’m buying a smartphone, I might as well get an iPhone so everything works together. For this reason, I’ve always been a faithful iPhone customer.

Since this strategy worked so well for me for so many years, there was no reason not to buy another iPhone when my three-year-old iPhone X started showing it’s age. Plus, it was the iPhone mini, something I’ve been lusting after since the days of the iPhone 8. If the KaiOS flip phone ends up being more of a hindrance to me than a help, it is to the iPhone which I will gladly return.

But you know what? I don’t think I will.

With this flip phone, a weight has already been lifted off my shoulders. Smartphones have a way of drawing attention like a gravitational well, and it’s hard to pick up a smartphone and not end up doing fifty other things as well. I don’t have that problem with my flip phone. I answer a call or a text, and then I get back to work. It is as psychologically interesting to me as my keys or my wallet — which is to say, not at all. I’ve never felt this free to focus on the present moment before in my life.

Add that to the fact that I no longer have to worry about or buy insurance for or repair a $1000 piece of glass and silicon and am likely to save the equivalent of a honeymoon vacation over the next decade or so, and I am delighted with my flip phone.

If you think you may be happy with a flip phone too, buy one and see. Best case scenario, you save tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours over the course of your life. Worst case, you’re out $60. It’s worth a try.

Since the best and worst parts of life choices tend to reveal themselves with time, I plan to write several more articles over the next year about what it’s been like living without a smartphone, just as I do for living without social media. But if living without social media has been any indicator, life will only get better.

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Footnotes

1: Professional or serious hobbyist athletes may get their money’s worth out of these stats. Maybe. But in my unscientific opinion, 2/3 of Apple Watch wearers are not getting any fitness benefit out of these ostensibly fitness-oriented devices — and even the professional athletes could probably benefit equally from a much cheaper Fitbit or Garmin watch.

The only demographic I can imagine who may actually get their money’s worth from the Apple Watch fitness stats are disabled and older adults who have to watch these stats like their lives are on the line because… well, because they are.

2: I read this statistic while researching this article, but I cannot for the life of me find the citation. But I have no reason to believe it’s fraudulent, it really underscores the point I’m making, and if it’s wrong, it’s only a little wrong, so I’ve chosen to include it here nonetheless.

3: What I’d really like is a KaiOS feature phone with a full keyboard like an old blackberry, which would be the perfect compromise between a feature phone and text composition, but the only one that exists is made by JioPhone in India, and I can’t get a US version for AT&T. 😩 Hopefully a feature phone manufacturer will read this article and make one for me.

4: This is an affiliate link.