How do you run WhatsApp or Signal without a smartphone? Pretty hard.
If your answer is "don't use them", then you're not living in a country where the vast majority of communications are done on WhatsApp or Signal, good for you I guess.
Yes that's fair. I have a an old iPhone without a sim that I use as my master for those apps, but I keep it in a drawer since the desktop apps work fine. Funny enough the phone the app is installed on doesn't have to be the same phone you use to register by number, so the number I registered with is my flip phone
Access to Signal and Bitwarden are the only two apps I really need daily that keep me on a smartphone. I have tried using a feature phone in the last couple years, but honestly I might as well just not have a phone at that point as almost all my communication is via Signal.
Well honestly that's part of the flip phone lifestyle, if someone doesn't want to call me, that's fine, they can send me an email. We don't have to bring Google or Apple into this relationship, it's a choice people make because the prefer texting and being available to everyone they ever met 24/7
> We don't have to bring Google or Apple into this relationship, it's a choice people make because the prefer texting and being available to everyone they ever met 24/7
You're changing the discussion now.
The original point is this: Given that people want to be able to text with their friends in what is perceived as a normal way, how can they do it without a smartphone?
If you change the rules ("Given that people are fine being disconnected"), of course it changes everything.
I don't think that 24/7 availability is universally perceived as "a normal way". A large number of my contacts will answer several days after a message. In my experience it is usually only inside the nuclear family that people expect answer within 2 hours and these are the kind of people who can always choose to call instead of text if they know their child/sibling/parent is not usually text available.
I don't know how many time I would have to repeat it, so I'll do it one last time.
The beginning was:
> what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?
To which someone answered:
> Has no one mentioned not using a smartphone as an option?
To which I answered that in a ton of situations this is just not an option.
And yet I keep getting answers that give examples of when it is an option. Sure, sometimes it is an option. Now for the majority of normal people who don't consider "not having a smartphone" as an option, I was saying that it is very, very hard to escape Apple/Google.
I am NOT saying that most people would die on the stop if they suddenly did not have access to a smartphone. I am saying that there is no solution to that that most people would consider viable.
> I don't think that 24/7 availability is universally perceived as "a normal way".
I never said 24/7 availability. I said "not having access to WhatsApp/Signal [in one's pocket, some of the time]". The part in brackets was implicit because we were talking about smartphone operating systems.
Doesn't really make sense in a conversation about security (the HN post was referencing security).
Traditional desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS, traditional Linux distros) are just at an entirely different level than modern mobile OSes (Android OSes, iOS) and ChromeOS. They also often run on less secure hardware, especially compared to a Pixel.
They don't publicize it because they'd rather sell all the data they don't have already through your payments and bank movements but many still send you a dedicated device if you mention you don't have a smartphone.
