Ditching My iPhone for a Flip Phone Made Me See How Useless Smartphones Can Be
By: Megan Holstein
Tags: Gadgets, Minimalism, Digital Life, Lifestyle, Productivity

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: