---
title: Featurephone Woes
date: 2024-01-23
tags:
  - featurephone
---

It's day 4 and some of the irritations are becoming apparent.

Not being able to shut it up at night is bad.
I may start storing it in another room, I'm not sure.
My wife seems to think no featurephone ever had quiet hours:
that was a smartphone thing.
Maybe. But I don't like getting notification sounds
at 11pm when there's a blip in Internet connectivity.

KaiOS 3.0 is locked down hard.
I can't sideload apps:
the only way to test things out is on my device is to register a developer account,
upload the app to their store,
and then sign my phone up as a tester for the app.
I'll do that, but I'm not happy about it.

I did make an audiobook player, though!
And it seems to work just dandy.
So I've restored that function.
There's a W3C standard for audiobook manifests,
so in theory I can make an app where you just provide a URL to a standard-compliant manifest and blammo,
you have that audiobook.
Pretty easy,
and I [i]love[/i] that the app development platform is just HTML and JavaScript.
Every mobile OS should work this way. This is the right thing.

Some of the things I thought would be problematic just aren't.
The loss of the Signal app just doesn't matter:
I'm using the desktop app,
which I like better anyway,
since our chats are more long-form. 
And it looks like my crew is dipping their toes back into IRC anyway,
which is great,
because it's an open standard,
so I can develop an app for it.

I need to deposit a check today.
It looks like nobody's web page allows that:
I must use a smartphone.
That's... irritating. 

A couple of nice things have happened, too.
Because texting is so much less convenient,
I'm spending more time in voice calls with my kid,
which I like quite a bit.
It also didn't take long at all for me to lose the compulsion to "check my phone".
It's totally gone,
no withdrawl symptoms or anything.
That may be worth all the other inconveniences.
We'll see.
