Hi! I am completely, completely in love with the concept of this phone. The only issue is with two key safety features. First is GPS, which I know you are already considering. The second is a rideshare app. I know that rideshare goes against the idea of a minimalist phone, but for young people like me (who, frankly, need to deaddict themselves from tech more than anyone) rideshare is very much a safety issue. I don’t have a car and live in a city where the subway system gets stalled or temporarily shut down on a regular basis, and it’s a choice between rideshare and risking a dangerous late-night commute. It’s important to me to be able to access a ride home, and taxis are now almost obsolete.
The third idea I have is less for the phone and more for the desktop companion. Messaging apps like Whatsapp and signal have fully functioning desktop apps and SHOULD only require text verification to set up, but for some stupid reason, you have to do the initial sign up on a smartphone and only then can you log into the desktop app. Is there any way you could create a desktop companion so that Mudita users could sign up for these messaging services using a “dumb” phone? I don’t care if Whatsapp and Signal are on my phone, but I have to contact international relatives regularly and I’d like to be able to do it from my laptop.
Hi Aalia and welcome to the forum, great to have you here.
I’d just like to clarify some of your statements regarding the Whatsapp and Signal desktop apps: The one developed by Facebook works as a tunnel to your phone and while your phone is not connected to the internet, the desktop app is useless other than for reading local copies of the past few messages:
The Signal desktop on the other hand is a full-featured client that works independently of the phone app, even if the battery of the phone is empty or while the phone is for another reason not connected to the internet. The only thing that is missing in the desktop app for Signal is the signup feature, which means it is necessary to sign up using a smartphone first* before activating the desktop app.
Another difference between the two desktop apps is the importing of conversation history: Signal doesn’t import any conversation history, while Whatsapp imports your entire conversation history on request.
Since Whatsapp requires an online smartphone I don’t see how the Mudita desktop app could help in making the desktop Whatsapp client work. For allowing Signal at least on your desktop this would work though.
*As a workaround to the smartphone requirement of Signal I managed to register my laptop on Signal using the signal-cli command line tool and link my desktop app to the command line tool, so instead of using a smartphone to register it is possible to work around this. If the Mudita desktop companion app could streamline this device linking process for Signal clients to make it accessible for people that don’t want to use the command line or a fallback smartphone, that would be a great of course!