more phone crap

content/blog/2024/01-23-featurephone-woes/index.md

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+---
+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.