4 ms·

I am increasingly and severely avoiding the use of my mobile phones, mostly because of how it interferes your life. I don't know how much this is true for every

I am increasingly and severely avoiding the use of my mobile phones, mostly because of how it interferes your life. I don't know how much this is true for everyone else, but I have found plenty of desktop applications that do exactly what I want and little else (shells, browsers, websites, Discord, Steam, Spotify, work software, etc.). And I sit at the desk for most of the day. My phone is at my desk. I turn off all notifications and sounds, and only allow it to ring from people on my contacts, and I otherwise don't use it. It's basically a chat computer that sits on my desk. I'll take it with me on any major trip anywhere, but otherwise when I leave, I try to not bring my phone. I don't know how people stand to live with these devices and the irritating software that runs on them. The expectation now is that anything you install will irritate you, and people aren't properly valuing their time, but some of them catch on to it, and stop installing new software...

jasonv 6y ago
I agree with you. My partner left her phone home the other night when we went out to run errands. It felt like a pretty big step on her part. I've been considering reformatting my phone and installing a bare minimum of add-on apps. Feels cleaner, and I have way too many apps on my phone to go and delete them individually.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I turned off all notifications except calendar reminders (only created deliberately by me anyways), phone calls, SMS/iMessage, and WhatsApp messages (how I communicate with my wife and most of her family). That made the phone much less annoying without needing to delete everything. It's just that everything else is more like email, something I check a few times a day not things that notify me every other second. None of it is urgent, so it's at my leisure.
musicale 6y ago
> I don't know how people stand to live with these devices and the irritating software that runs on them I saw the beginning of the end when a dialog box popped up saying something like "Microsoft Word requires your attention." This represented (to me at the time) a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of office software and who it was working for. Apparently Microsoft (and Apple who implemented whatever irritating API they were using) decided that software should be in charge of the user, instead of the reverse. Now with the attention economy, there is little pretense regarding who the software serves primarily (vendors and advertisers) and who it exerts dominion over (users.)
ZeteticElench 6y ago
There is an annoying trend of companies moving to mobile only apps, like Samsung health used to have a nice web site but they dropped it and now you can only view your data on your mobile phone or use an emulator.

jasonv 6y ago

I agree with you. My partner left her phone home the other night when we went out to run errands. It felt like a pretty big step on her part. I've been considering reformatting my phone and installing a bare minimum of add-on apps. Feels cleaner, and I have way too many apps on my phone to go and delete them individually.

Jtsummers 6y ago
I turned off all notifications except calendar reminders (only created deliberately by me anyways), phone calls, SMS/iMessage, and WhatsApp messages (how I communicate with my wife and most of her family). That made the phone much less annoying without needing to delete everything. It's just that everything else is more like email, something I check a few times a day not things that notify me every other second. None of it is urgent, so it's at my leisure.

musicale 6y ago

> I don't know how people stand to live with these devices and the irritating software that runs on them I saw the beginning of the end when a dialog box popped up saying something like "Microsoft Word requires your attention." This represented (to me at the time) a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of office software and who it was working for. Apparently Microsoft (and Apple who implemented whatever irritating API they were using) decided that software should be in charge of the user, instead of the reverse. Now with the attention economy, there is little pretense regarding who the software serves primarily (vendors and advertisers) and who it exerts dominion over (users.)

ZeteticElench 6y ago

There is an annoying trend of companies moving to mobile only apps, like Samsung health used to have a nice web site but they dropped it and now you can only view your data on your mobile phone or use an emulator.