I completely agree @mmallen37. I kept my Kompakt pretty minimal also, but it was very tempting to constantly tweek it because I am a perfectionist, and I love the capability of the interface. All of the community developed apps are so fantastic, but as more of them come out it is tempting to constantly tinker with the setup of the Kompakt. I ultimately wish the Mudita apps that came on it were more developed. That is eventually what drove me away. If they had been fully developed when the phone came out, I would not have become obsessed with tinkering with it and sideloading so many different apps. I would have just been able to turn it on and go. The Mudita maps app, for example, was completely unusable in the US. I could not look up an address with a street number and actually use it to navigate to a location.
Right now my full-time daily driver is the Light Phone 3, which is the device I settled on. While I wish it did have more tools available such as weather (really critical for my day to day), I have gotten by without it for now, and I know there are a lot of community needs such as integrating Whatsapp, etc. I have discovered a service at www.smarterdumbphone.com that works for my daily weather notifications via SMS, and to send occasional inquiries so I don’t have to open my laptop for something and get sucked into that. It is worth the cost to me. The Light Phone does not cause me to want to constantly customize, and I can get on with my day. They are doing fundraising to hire additional dev staff in the next year, so I expect the software development to be much better/quicker in the future. The existing tools for it are developed enough to be very functional for me, and the interface just does something to my brain to make it non-addictive.
The last device I tried was the Sidephone. It is a really fantastic device and I cannot say enough good things about the developers. They have been super transparent, responsive and present during their whole device development and initial roll out. The device itself is great, but it is similar to the Kompakt in the respect that you can sideload apps and customize it to your liking as well. It is still a minimal device and allows users a good balance. But that’s why I eventually decided against it for my needs.
In the past before a lot of these newer devices were released, I have used the Sunbeam F1 Pro flip phones, and I REALLY loved them. One of my favorite things were the indicator lights on the front that showed if you had a missed call or a new message. I could just look at it throughout the day walking by and then move on. Everything about the phones just work and is very reliable. It is also a really great company and customer service was always a pleasure to deal with. Eventually I wanted to be able to have podcasts which is why I moved on.
All of these devices are great, but they are not 1 size fits all. I am so grateful that there are so many more options on the market now. The Kompakt was fantastic too, it just wasn’t the perfect fit for me.
I enjoy hearing the perspective and experiences of others going through similar journeys, and I hope that maybe this information helped at least 1 person (which is why I wrote so much). I am wishing you all the best in your digital minimalism journey!
