Some Backstory

For a long time now I’ve been fairly comfortable simply stating

I plain don’t like smartphones

I’ve gone into this in more detail elsewhere – but the short version is:

• They’re very poor mobile computing devices
• They’re very poor telephones
• They’re designed to actively work against (and spy upon) the user

However, I need a telephone of some sort. And while I try my utmost to eliminate it, there is some software which (grudgingly) I’m compelled to run outside of a PC.

Back to the Future

My original plan was to delegate as much of my mobile computing to a lightweight laptop, while network connectivity I would use through a simple feature phone with 4G and Wifi connectivity. How did this go?

Well, the former has been incredibly successful. I love my MacBook Air running Gentoo, and it’s now my most commonly used machine (I only jump onto the powerful desktop for gaming or heavyweight coding these days). It’s tiny, portable, has an incredibly long battery life, a fantastic keyboard interface – and most importantly, I control absolutely everything it does. No spying, no walled garden, just open source goodness.

For the latter, I went with the super-robust Cat B35 KaiOS feature phone.

Now, on paper this is just perfect. It had 4G (and VoLTE), Wifi (and Wifi calling), could create a hotspot, and could be rooted. It had physical buttons for T9 texting. It should have good battery life and be extremely tough (I could actually wash it under the tap). And the KaiOS operating system was completely divorced from Google and Android, while supporting a number of simple Apps (weather, browser, 2-factor auth, and even WhatsApp).

The reason is simple and a little dispiriting: KaiOS is simply not fit for purpose.

You can see why I thought this might be the perfect fit. I was pretty sad to find, then, that after a few months of use I was ready to look elsewhere. The reason is simple and a little dispiriting: KaiOS is simply not fit for purpose. Its feature set and underlying design is great – but the implementation (based on very old versions of Firefox – KaiOS is derived from the now defunct Firefox OS) is dreadful.

1. The biggest problem is it is just too slow. This means that of every button press, maybe only 2/3 are actually picked up by the OS. With an interface that relies on (lovely!) tactile buttons and muscle memory – this is infuriating. You may not think this is a serious problem, so here’s an illustration: the unit has a great shortcut to press and hold to turn on the torch. But 50% of the time, nothing happens – that’s how janky the input is.
2. My main mode of communication will always be phone calls and texts. It’s a deal-breaker, then, that the T9 text system is horribly broken. I was astonished when I first started using the phone that the text input was (i) not aware of capitalization of sentences or the pronoun “I” (ii) had limited support for apostrophes, making it’s can’t won’t and many other common constructions extremely fiddly to type (iii) did not even understand line-breaking, so words would be split in the middle. To make matters worse, both adding words to the dictionary and first-letter capitalization mode were actively broken (did nothing).
3. So sending texts was incredibly painful. But it gets worse: this text input applies across the whole OS, meaning these problems apply when using WhatsApp, the browser, or any other apps.
4. Combine this with the input performance lag, and you have a recipe for extreme frustration.
5. Unfortunately battery life was also pretty poor. This could have been a worn second-hand unit, but I suspect had something to do with poor signal in my Cornish abode. I would get a day or so of battery – just plain not enough.

There were some things I really liked about the B35, and that I wasn’t keen to lose in any replacement:

1. It was a great telephone. Clear, loud, nice to hold, and no trouble with accidentally pressing the stupid touchscreen with my ear.
2. Wifi calling is an amazing feature. It turns my house from a signal blackspot to the best place to phone. Amazingly was not supported on my older Android phone.
3. The hotspot was a must-have for me
4. Rooting and completely controlling the device are important
5. The toughness of the unit was definitely appreciated. The size of the thing – I couldn’t fit it comfortable in a pocket – not so much.

Options

So I had a pretty well understood set of “requirements”. While these are obviously particular to me, I don’t think they’re too unusual, and I found (especially looking at the /r/dumbphones Reddit community) that there were many others seeking something similar:

• Call and text super-reliably
• Have good T9 support that actually understands English (capitalize sentences! can’t, don’t and it’s are incredibly common and should be easy!)
• Have good battery life. It’s a phone, not a tamagotchi, I shouldn’t have to feed it every day if I’m not using it
• Connect to 4G and wifi, and tethering
• Do wifi calling – I live in a thick-walled stone house in a rural area!

I had already spent some time looking for options – but a large proportion of feature phones out there run KaiOS, and I strongly suspected the deficiencies I’d found were (i) not restricted to the Cat B35 and (ii) would not be fixed in KaiOS 3. This meant that some favourites like the Nokia “Bananaphone” and many flip-phones were out.

I was intrigued by a number of the purpose-built minimal phones on the market: the Lightphone from the USA, the Mudita Pure from Poland and the Punkt 2 from Switzerland.

• The Lightphone is very expensive (hundreds of pounds). I’d be very happy to pay a high price for a simple, elegant phone. But I’m put off by the bad texting implementation again (I think the idea was it was deliberately bad, I guess?).
• The Mudita looked very promising indeed, I love their philosophy, but I was seriously put off by this review (by a sponsor – “this is one awful phone that I helped to make”) that suggested it wasn’t a very good phone.
• That leaves the Punkt. Also pricey, but this seems like it could be a real contender – but of course, it’s missing wifi calling. If I have to walk half a mile to use the damn thing at home, it’s hard to justify spending £270 on it.

I was even willing to consider ditching this whole idea, and going back to using a dead-cheap and simple ancient 2G Nokia. The fact was, this would do everything I needed as a telephone – and 2G will be supported in the UK until at least 2032 (I would couple this with a 4G modem for data remotely).

The Next Contender

Playing around with my requirements in the Dumbphone Finder when I came across a model I had never heard of before – one of the few that fitted my needs.

The Xioami Qin F21 Pro is a Chinese market phone, designed to be a focus smartphone for students. It’s a full Android 11 phone, with physical keypad and no Google default software. It’s Mediatek based, and weirdly quite computationally while having decent (I’ve found, in fact, excellent) battery life.

The dumbphone community have adopted it, and once unlocked (and potentially rooted) have found it a very flexible do-anything device. The small touchscreen can be used in a pinch, but the majority of input is through the physical buttons.

I bought a unused model on ebay for about £110.

It supports all the fancy features (wifi calling etc) I needed. However, I’d need to work on the software to turn it into the private, distraction-free user-focus device I wanted. Not having to deal with the Google data octopus would make things simpler; but instead I would need to remove any Xioami software I thought might not be trustworthy.

Configuration relevant to anyone wanting to configure Android 10+ for security, privacy and usability – away from Google

It took me a few weeks, but I’ve now got the phone to a state where I am delighted with it. I’ll review the phone separately, but for now I’ve broken down the configuration steps into several parts, as they’re very relevant to anyone wanting to configure Android 10+ for security, privacy and usability – away from Google.

First, there are some notes on the philosophy behind this … and what you can expect to get as the end result

1. Backup, unlocking, rooting and replacing stock firmware
2. Google’s stranglehold on Android
3. Eliminating all Google dependencies with MicroG
4. Firewall, DNS and Ad blocking
5. Location and tracking prevention
6. Stock software de-bloating and permission lockdown
7. Recommended open source software
8. Untrustworthy App lockdown with Shelter
9. Power saving and kernel tweaks
10. T9 as good as 90s Nokia with Traditional T9
11. Aesthetic tweaks: permanent dark mode, bootup logo, phone volume
12. Launcher and custom icons