I have two phones now: iPhone 7 and Kompakt. Never been happier

Mindful Work
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I am a huge fan of the Mudita Kompakt and I’ve been using it as my daily driver for six months now, but there has always been one big problem for me… I am a complete Apple person through and through. My entire life is embedded in the Apple ecosystem and I refuse to leave it. I have an Apple One subscription. I work on my MacBook. Most my clients communicate to me via iMessage, and I use AirPods constantly. My family chats to eachother and shares photos via iMessage. My church group has 19 members in the chat, and everyone in the bible study has an iPhone. In America, this is pretty normal. And it’s literally annoying to be a “green bubble” when so much of your life revolves around this ecosystem. It’s not about being looked down or judged, it’s about functional practicality.

For the last five months I used a hack where I used an old iPhone to “register” my phone number with iMessage and then took the SIM card out and kept the iPhone on AirPlane mode 24/7 plugged in and on my nightstand.

I used OpenBubbles on my Mudita and had no issues for months… but then… it started wigging out. Not syncing, booting my number from iMessage. I’d have to do the hack over and over. And because Mudita is a de-googled number I also couldn’t even pay for the OpenBubbles hosted plan where they register your number on their servers that emulate an iPhone for you.

I bit the bullet and just got a second phone number through Mint Mobile (which is what I had in USA to begin with, it’s basically a cheap T-Mobile plan) and all my problems are solved now.

I have my main number that I’ve had since high school on my iPhone. It’s $15 a month.

I have a secondary brand new number for my Mudita. My parents, my brother, my wife, and my best friends have that number. Maybe 6 people total. I’m gonna keep it that way. It’s a secret number. I don’t want my clients to know about it. It’s also $15 a month (which is still way cheaper than what I used to pay verizon when I used an iPhone as a primary phone)

I forward my old number to my new number on the mudita, and I use OpenBubbles on the Mudita now with perfect reliability because the main number people iMessage me from is my old number that is tied to the iPhone that sits on my desk.

A waste you say of an expensive iPhone? Nope. I bought an iPhone 7 for literally $40 on eBay. No big deal. Just stays plugged in, and to be honest, if I really need it on a vacation for example for “SmartPhone things” I have it. But realistically, it stays on my nightstand stashed away and plugged in 24/7.

I pay $30 total a month for unlimited data/calls on both. All my phone calls come in through the phone forwarding feature, and now I even get SMS texts through iMessage on my mac because I’m using an iPhone again like that handy autofill verification SMS text thing iPhone and Mac do.

I still keep my Apple One membership. I have Apple Music sideloaded on Mudita and it works flawlessly. I send photos to my loved ones on iMessage via my MacBook.

oh and the “camera” solution? I sold my $1200 iPhone I had before Mudita and used that money to buy a sony RX100 VII. It takes incredible photos and videos and is a much better tool for the job and can still fit in my pocket. (i also take my mirrorless camera everywhere I go because I’m a weird “photographer” type)

I love this setup. It’s truly been game changing. I only have the apps I need on my Mudita. NO social media allowed.

AND I LOVE the Mudita. I literally PREFER it over an iPhone. I love the screen. The UI. The intentionality.

ONE FEATURE I’d love to request is automatic contact syncing with Apple. I know somehow LightPhone has done it, I am confident that Mudita can figure out the system.

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Nice. I use an iPad mini and my Mk. What happened to your LP3? Too restrictive?

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Yeah having to hack it to get apps sideloaded was a pain and I prefer ePaper and the design of the Mudita

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You have phone calls forwarding to your MK. Do you have a way to have texts forwarded too?

Or do you handle the iMessage group chats on the computer only

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Sorry if I wasn’t super clear,

there is an app called OpenBubbles that I use on the Mudita Kompakt that I sideloaded. It is full iMessage on my Mudita

https://youtube.com/shorts/HHTdzmAPYj8?si=mDsUGLNBcNJOcfa7

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Following up here: I am currently building an OpenClaw system and it will be able to handle this for me.

I’m actually really excited about this combo. Using OpenClaw to manage a lot of my “smart apps” and other things so I can use Mudita as primary.

I’d love to use as few side-loaded tools as possible on Mudita

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@ultramaze: I had a Kompakt at v1.1 and v1.2 last year but sold it because of missing group-messaging and voicemail features back then. (I hope to get another Kompakt after Mudita fully enables voicemail features that are standard here in the USA.)

If I recall correctly, I successfully sideloaded and used the DAVx5 app on my Kompakt to sync with my household’s common contacts and calendar, which we keep at a free, cloud-based instance of Nextcloud. (This lets us share contacts and calendar across a Google Android cellphone, a deGoogled cellphone, a Windows 11 PC, and a NUC running Ubuntu.)

Curious about your comment about automatic contact syncing with Apple (not with a Nextcloud instance), I found this:

Could this be a solution for you?

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I just tried this. Sideloaded it and enabled contact cards and calendar access, but don’t see how it’s working? Is it supposed to add calendar events on my default Mudita Calendar app?

Does it automatically sync my contacts to Mudita’s contacts when I add something on my mac or iphone?

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Out of curiosity, how do you host your NextCloud instance ?
About 5 years back, I had a NextCloud instance on a shared web hosting service (I am not sure this is the right term) but it was suboptimal because I could only use the web installer.

It was pretty good and I guess it’s made huge progress in the meantime !

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Mudita’s Phone app gets the synchronized contacts, but you will need the Etar app for the synchronized calendar. Here is what I posted back in May of 2025 (again for a Nextcloud instance, as I was not an iPhone user):

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I do not host it. I use a cloud-based service, which is free for 2 gigabytes or less (plenty for contacts and calendar events). Here is what I wrote back in May of 2025:

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Oh nice. I didn’t know they offered this service ! <3

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