I want a phone where I can’t go on the internet or read the news, just communicate with people I actually know in real life. Is there any way I can make this happen?
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Just grab a cheap current gen smartphone or a second hand smartphone and only install those apps?
You might need to flash a custom rom to delete certain apps that come pre-installed and you might want to find the right launcher so you can customise your app drawer to throw a few apps necessary for installation or handling links (e.g. when you get the inevitable hyperlink via Signal that you need to be able to browse) into the oubliette so that you only have a dialler, SMS, Signal and Telegram visible.
Install only what you want and have someone you know lock down the ability to install anything else. Should be possible with parental controls
This seems the simplest, thanks
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I think it’s pretty clear they mean they don’t want an internet browser
An “internet browser” is not a thing. The web is not the same thing as the internet.
And wanting to not have a web browser is a silly thing to want anyway.
Can you really not understand what the OP and I are trying to say or do you just want everyone to know that you know the right terminology and we don’t?
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I think the OP is a silly nostalgiabrained hipster who doesn’t understand what he’s asking for
Are you curious why I want this?
I think I know why but sure
spoiler
some combination of “I keep going to websites I hate and getting upset about the things I look at on them” and “Remember when phones were just phones”
I’m not really a “remember when phones were just phones” guy. I’m more of a Bo Burnum / Richard Stalman style “social media is hijacking our brains” guy.
I’m addicted to my phone but really appreciate some of its functionalities and want the parts that are useful without the parts that are harming me.
Fresh outta Reddit, eh?
I wish you a speedy recovery 🙏
You cannot have signal and telegram but also no web browser or anything else.
First you’re looking at flashing a phone with a stripped down custom android OS like lineage but even those come with a browser installed as a bare minimum of functionality. Then your looking at side loading those two apps without installing google play services, which you might be able to do with telegram, but not with signal. IIRC signal requires google play services installed. You can try to flash the pico version of google but I think you dont want to go that far.
There is molly, a frontend for signal thats available on fdroid
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Like to really so that you have to build a custom OS that no one else probably has. Or maybe it does exist, but I doubt it.
You want a dumbphone - of which your options are going to be like phones that specifically lack browsing/internet features like Tracphones or Nokia phones. (Another alternative is like the Sunbeam F1 or various Japanese dumbphones)
Alternatively, you could just buy a cheap Android phone and use ADB to remove those features (like the built-in browser and wifi) you don’t want.
link but the subreddit for dumbphones is an excellent resource: https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/zpw77o/state_of_the_dumbphone_2023_read_this_first/Might be easier to give advice if you can explain the motivation. Are you worried about privacy with smartphones? The cost? Spending too much time dicking around on it? Controlling a kid?
I don’t know of a way to get a phone that only has those apps, they require internet to work. GrapheneOS can be quite secure and you can simply not install any more than the base apps and then freeze the built in browser, but then you’ll need to manually update Signal and Telegram and I assume you needing to unfreeze your browser to grab regular updates is far too much of a pain. Running outdated versions of secure chat apps is a risk.
It’s to have a less compulsive relationship to my phone. What I ended up doing was setting a 5 minuet timer on Chrome, setting it to black and white, and switching to a text-only UI.
I have been using the app “Lock Me Out”. For your use case, you could make a list of allowed apps - Phone, your SMS app, Signal, Telegram - and set a 24h restriction to only those apps. Then password-lock it so you aren’t tempted to remove the restrictions.
Ypu could buy a raspberry pi and attach a sim card module, then just not install any browsers. I think both signal and telegram needs electron but I think you can install electron without an actual browser.
In that case, a custom ROM is probably the best bet. I quite like GrapheneOS, as it will let you install Google Play but sandboxed - this gives you a lot more control to suppress its notifications (so your phone isn’t begging you for attention when it doesn’t really need it) while still keeping Signal and Telegram updated. I’m assuming you’re able to use hte phone without compulsively going to install things without parental controls to literally stop you, so the Play Store itself being available wouldn’t be so much an issue. The issue is that GrapheneOS is only on relatively recent Pixel phones only, and that’s a lot of money to spend on a device that only ever runs chat apps and phone calls. I don’t know of any other custom ROM that does that sandboxing, so I don’t know whether they’re able to suppress those notifcations which are likely at hte heart of any compulsive use.
I would say a flip phone would be better, but again since you specifically need these two apps that does limit you to a smartphone of some kind. Lively sells phones marketed to seniors (you might remember commercials for Jitterbug phones) that can be locked down with only a few apps - this might work for your purposes But if you do that, do at least make sure someone else gets your old phone that needs one, no sense in contributing to e-waste.
You may be able to get telegram working on a KaiOS flip phone, but those can actually access the internet as well (very shitty, has huge 2004 RAZR web browser energy). Signal does not and will not ever have a presence on KaiOS unless someone with very very deep pockets decides to throw absurd money at the signal maintainers with the specific demand that they create and maintain an official KaiOS store webapp because of the way that KaiOS works.
If you want to escape app hell, maybe try a Pine phone and run an open source OS on it. It probably won’t stop you from accessing the internet, though.
A colleague of mine is happy with their phone from Punkt.
