Discussing smartphone use with various people recently, I quickly come back to the same question - what do you need it for? This is not a masked way of saying they don’t need a smartphone, but a genuine question. I’m personally happy to accept that people use smartphones for a variety of reasons, from professional work, to having to pay for parking, and from medical technology to not having access to laptops or computers.
So maybe a stepping stone to better co-design of smartphone use is to be more open about what we need to use our phones for, and why we carry them around with us. This post, then, is a bit of an experiment to start surfacing thoughts. The question is applicable to all devices, but I figure a) better to start somewhere specific, and b) smartphones are a particularly “invasive” device. So…
Which functions on your smartphone do you feel you NEED it for, and why?
To start, I’d say there are some things I like to have my phone on me for - camera, photo editing, note-taking. But the things I probably need it for on the go are:
- Necessary contact from family and friends via phone call, text and (specific) group chats
- Parking apps, as paying by machine often isn’t available here
- Finding directions in strange places
- Access to passwords and one-time codes
- Transferring emergency funds to kids’ bank cards
- Checking my calendar
I guess there will be a lot of overlap, but that’s good to know. And it would also be interesting to know what less common cases exist: I think a mindful tech movement risks coming from a privileged position, and so awareness of these less common needs is all an essential part of the discussion.
There are no right or wrong answers here, just the opportunity to open up and find out from others :)
I’d add public transport to the list. Searching connections, booking tickets, navigating through large train stations etc.
I struggle to agree in the strict sense of need. But it’s a boiling frog scenario.
Public transport managers have mostly quit offering printed schedules and maps. IMO that’s borderline a violation of human rights (all people are entitled to equal access to public services, and I would consider providing info about public transport to be an indispensible part of that public service). Although in terms of smartphones, you can typically use a PC instead. And inside the stations you often have schedules and maps on the walls. But the bus infrastructure is dicier.
In Germany there are ticket sales with online exclusive pricing. Offline people must pay more for the same trip, or even lose access to some tickets entirely. Although a PC may still be an option there.
Sure, you don’t need apps, but they can save you hours of waiting if you can change your plans quickly, for example when a train is delayed or cancelled and you need to find other alternatives.
Yeah I agree, I’ll easily file public transportation apps as a need. During delays it can be vital. And have fun when you find yourself in an area new to you late at night after being out with friends and you don’t even know where the closest bus stop/train or subway station is, without a way to look it up on the phone. You definitely need an app to look that up and to plan your route home.
Yes, the question of how we define “need” is absolutely a key point here, and I guess I deliberately left it open to interpretation as I think it’s subjective, but also that how we define it can change as we think about it and question it too.
The online/offline benefits always irks me - I mean I get the economics behind pushing people to be more “convenient” (on behalf of the company, usually) but it avoids the entire conversation about digital exclusion and accessibility. Strangely, I often see parking rates cost more when you use the app, as you get charged for paying with their card service. Ho hum.
GPS, music. That’s the necessities for me.
Now, I would want a physical keyboard like my old pre-smart lg reflex had, if I had to give up the smart phone. fuck texting on a regular phone keyboard.
https://www.tindie.com/products/zitaotech/blackberry-bb9900-bleusb-keyboard/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnA4d6uEKS0&t=5s&ab_channel=JoeLiTrenta
there are a few other versions from the same shop. tindie is dangerous
When the iphone6+ came out and was bending, I was so sure the market was gonna pivot back to thick phones. And to me the obvious next step was bringing back slide out keyboards.
I can probably type faster with swiping and learning predictive autocorrect, but I’ll never be able to do it blind :c
There’s nothing I can think of that is totally impossible without a smartphone. Just less convenient to varying degrees. Some of that is because of the fact that you’d need to carry several devices and/ or paper alternatives like we did in the dark ages. But some of it’s just because people expect everyone to be carrying a smartphone these days.
For Amazon returns I need to scan the QR code in the Amazon app at the post office. That could potentially be avoided by printing the QR code, but there’s no mechanism I know of at the moment to download the code.
I do check my email and online calendar when I’m out sometimes for details if I’m heading somewhere or checking when something is. This could be avoided by using a paper diary and printing out relevant emails.
For watching videos, listening to podcasts and checking Lemmy I’d either need to use a tablet, a laptop (which I generally use at home rather than my smartphone) or a dedicated audio player for the podcasts for portability.
Banking can be done via my laptop, phone call or in person at my local branch (for now).
Obviously phone calls and texts could be handled by a “dumb” phone.
Some restaurants ask you to order via their website or app but I’m sure if you kicked up enough of a fuss they’d find another way of handling that.
I rarely take photos or video but carrying a digital camera could replace the need of a smartphone for that. There are a lot of small, high quality options out there these days.
A smartphone is very useful for navigation but that could be taken care of with a handheld satnav device.
You’re really asking “how much convenience do you need?” Some people are entirely enslaved to what Tim Wu describes as the Tyranny of Convenience.
I am not one of those people. I have ditched Google Playstore which greatly limits what I can do with the phone (and I’m fine with that – fuck suppliers demanding that I patronise Google). And since I am always around a PC I only use a smartphone for:
- offline navigation with OSMand (hard to give up)
- notes (could give that up easily)
- camera – to take a pic of store hours posted on a door, occasional QR codes, to capture evidence when a store advertises a different price than they charge at the register, and because there are actually hardware stores that have no posted prices and you need to give the cashier the item number of (e.g.) a pipe fitting so they can ring it up. Also to capture rejection messages from ATM screens because ATMs are not designed well enough to print faults with the receipt printer.
- some (stupidly) high-tech restaurants have no paper menu. Although I prefer to ask staff to borrow their phone to highlight to them the foolishness of their operation. My hardened defensive phone does not even work with most websites and i need to do this anyway.
This a really great question. I honestly can’t think of a single thing that I could not do if I didn’t have a smartphone. This is interesting because this is how it used to be, and it seems like that changed, but maybe it didn’t. I might do an experiment for a week where I don’t use my smartphone and see how it goes.
I miss the short period of time between when WiFi came out and before smart phones. You had to pull out your laptop and find free public WiFi in order to go online to make plans and search (or use an Internet cafe), and then you would have to leave the WiFi to actually go do things. This made it so we had IRL, and we could still share memories and socialize online, but those were separate. This was the last era where we had a proper separation between “going online” and being offline. After that, we are always online, mindlessly pulling out our phones to “socialize” or doom scroll.