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 :)

  • @[email protected]
    3•4 months ago

    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.