Introduction
First up I want to say, that even though this review will be quite critical, I’ve been using the Kompakt for half a year now as my only phone and will continue to use it for the next few years. At this point I’ve modified it so much, that I’m actually satisfied with how it turned out and I honestly think that there is a lot of potential in the concept of this phone.
That said, whenever someone is interested in and asks me about it (which actually happens a lot, just because of how different it looks like) I always strongly recommend against using this phone. As long as you are not prepared to take a couple of days to properly set everything up and modify basically all of the software, I cannot see any use-case for this phone. Also looking at how Mudita is presenting/perceiving their own product and what they are priotizing in their updates, I don’t think I’m going to get any other phone from this company in the future. All of that may sound harsh, but hopefully you will understand where I am coming from, after reading through my experience.
So on paper this sounded really nice. Distraction-free, de-Googled, EInk screen, ability to install any app, yet no bloatware and a hardware offline-mode switch. All of these features sounded exactly like what I was looking for. But the reality is very different.
Everything wrong with the Kompakt
What you get
When you first start the Kompakt, you will get a really locked down version of android. 95% of the features of stock android are not available. Not because the phone or the OS couldn’t do them, but because Mudita decided to protect you from them. And while I can understand this for anything that would create distraction, this was actually done for so much more that has nothing to do with distraction. For example most of the accessibility features of android are not available. Why? These are meant to help people, that otherwise have a hard time using any phone because of physical disabilities. There is no reason to protect anyone from that. In general most settings that you are used to since android 2.3 are hidden for no reason. Also features that no one would ever expect to be missing in the first place. Like that it is impossible to rotate the screen orientation. From the outside it looks like these things were actually just removed, so that Mudita had less work optimizing the OS for their hardware and could cut a lot of corners during development. Which I even understand, given that Mudita is a tiny company compared to other phone manufacturers, but selling such a product without a big disclaimer seems at best dishonest.
Furthermore a lot of settings were hidden here, that would’ve worked perfectly and should’ve even been activated by default, like high contrast text, inverted colors or disabled animations, as they improve the readability on an EInk screen dramatically. At least these should’ve been featured more prominently than in stock android considering that these are most likely settings that even people without disabilities would like to use here. Even worse, Mudita seems to make an effort to patch out workarounds to get to these hidden settings.
The phone in its original form is completely insufficient for me, though I knew that before I even bought it. It only comes with a handful of apps and even Mudita acknowledges that users most likely need to install more software on it (hence the sideloading feature). I think we are all on the same page here, when I say that everyone has different apps/platforms to communicate, listen to music or organize our calendar entries. All stuff that Mudita clearly has in mind if you looking at the apps that they are shipping with the phone.
That said, I cannot wrap my head around why there are so many features missing that literally all phones of the last decade have and how the integration of user-installed software is so bad, if clearly Mudita knows that you will need to adapt your phone to your needs.
Yes, I don’t want distraction. But not for the sake of making the phone completely user-unfriendly. Why not both? Remove the distractions AND help the user to make the most out of this product.
Sideloading
While I think that sideloading is THE most important feature of the Kompakt, it is also the absolute worst way to allow the user to install new software. There is only one app that any user should ever sideload and that is an app store. Sideloading has just only downsides really:
- Its unsafe: Users need to search online for apps and download them from untrusted sources. A normal user will never be able to distinguish legitimate and malicious software. And the chance to click on a malware advertising campaign if you just google for a popular app is quite high.
- No updates: Users need to check regularly if there are updates available for apps that they already installed. That costs time and effort and especially for security patches everyone should have auto-updates enabled for their apps.
- Requires a PC: I often need an app when I am not at home. You may realise that you need a specific app for parking, to checkin to the apartment you booked for holidays or to make a reservation somewhere.
- It is slow: Apart from that it took me an hour to debug the mudita center, data transfer is super slow. It took over two minutes to transfer a 1MB app. At the same time, using MTP to transfer the same app was basically instant and requires no extra software. It’s plug and play. Unfortunately installing the app doesn’t work this way, because the Kompakt has no preinstalled file browser.
Just sideload an app store like F-Droid that comes with a self-updater and use this to install Aurora. Way more secure and more comfy. And you get the same level of freedom and distraction as with sideloading.
I think an option to enable an app store in the settings would be a way more elegant, user-friendly and secure solution than sideloading.
Preinstalled Apps
This is probably my biggest issue regarding design decisions with the Kompakt. It feels like most of Muditas resources goes into app development (instead of OS improvements). While I do understand that Mudita does that, to optimize the whole UX for the EInk screen, I don’t understand why they needed to reinvent the wheel like 20 times. In general all apps lack basic features that any other existing alternative out there has. So why not take established open-source software, fork it and re-theme or optimize it for the Mudita. There are already thousands of chess, calendar or notes apps out there. Why build worse ones from scratch? Using existing and well maintained open-source solutions would safe a lot of time for feature development, maintenance and thus money. And the customer would get a 1000x better product.
So let’s take a look at some examples from the apps, to show you what I mean when I’m saying they are lacking features to point that they are “useless”. Again, might sound harsh, but my argument is simply that users will sooner or later run in a lot of issues with these apps and will have to replace them. And personally I ran into all of these problems and more.
Chess
This is the only ever chess app that I’ve seen that does not have a two player mode. Preinstalling a game on a distraction-free phone in the first place is a bold choice in my opinion, but at least one could’ve taken the opportunity to only develop games that require another person in real life to play with. So that at least this is promoting an actual social activity.
Also what the hell, why is this missing? Like no offense, but if I would’ve developed that app, I would’ve started with the 2-Player mode, just because it is waaay easier to implement and only then added the chess engine. Like it doesn’t even makes sense from a software developers perspective.
Music
- No overview for albums or artists
- Doesn’t show album covers, lyrics or any other id3 tags than title, artist and album of a song
- you cannot import your playlist
- No Synchronizing music from a fileshare
- No Subsonic or any alternative streaming protocol supported
Calender
- no synchronization
- doesn’t even support half of the fields that you usually would expect from a calendar entry
- no integration with other apps
Keyboard
- don’t know why or how, but I was constantly mistyping on the preinstalled keyboard. any other keyboard I’ve downloaded didnt have that issue
- no Swype, which is really a missed opportunity for a phone with such a small screen
Camera
- All images are blurry, even in best light conditions
- No manual or auto focus
- No videos
- Any alternative camera app makes sharp images, can do video, has (auto) focus and a ton of more features. Only bummer is, that a lot of the alternatives crash or take really long to start sometimes. Took a while until I found a working one.
- No gallery app to watch photos
- No QR code reader
EBook reader
- only fits like 3 letters on the screen (I’m joking, but font size is way to big, even when set to small)
- especially nested lists are completely unreadable
Honestly I could go on and on here and I’m not going to talk about every app or issue. This is not meant to be a just mean bashing, really I just want to highlight that if you try to redo everything from scratch, each app will lack behind what anyone can already get for free immediately. So why even putting so much work into half-baked software that gets replaced by an established solution the second that the user unboxes the phone.
Also users are already used to have all of these basic features from previous phones. With sideloading enabled, I assume anyone will replace the existing apps as soon as they run into just one missing feature that is essential to them.
And without sideloading, this phone is really not useful for anything but calls and sms, so why would I pay so much for it? I have to assume that anyone who spends that much money, is also going to sideloading whatever app/feature they need.
Launcher
No customization, no wallpaper, no apps on your homescreen (only in the app drawer), you can’t even reorder the apps, so all apps you’ve installed yourself (the apps that YOU specifically chose to use over the preinstalled ones) are at the end of the app drawer. It seems like there could be a way to change this, because I see a section in the settings called “App Layout”. But clicking this crashes the settings app on my phone. Plus the icons render really bad on the EInk Screen. Not really the fault of the screen, but a launcher that focuses more on the app name instead of the icon would’ve been better.
There is also no way to hide or uninstall the preinstalled apps. Meaning to get to my apps, I always needed to scroll through all apps first, each time I wanted to open or switch the app. Really annoying and you end up spending actually more time on your phone, just because the whole navigation is way more complicated than on stock android. I read in the patch notes that replacing the default apps should be possible by now, but I didn’t try it out anymore and it sounds like it doesn’t work for all preinstalled apps either.
Needless to say that it didn’t take long until I decided to replace the default launcher as well. BUT unlike on every other android phone in the world, Mudita took the time to make this extra hard as well. If you are not familiar with a terminal and the android debug bridge, you won’t be able to do that.
Lockscreen
The lockscreen has some basic features like message notifications, showing that an alarm is set or a music widget. But unlike in stock android, none of that integrates with user installed apps, which makes it useless again. It also has weird requirements regarding the unlock method, but that’s okay, just another quirk that comes from reinventing the wheel.
Offline Switch
I love the idea of the offline switch. However without any userinstalled apps I don’t really know what you would use it for. It disables Camera, Wifi, Cellular Network, Bluetooth and Microphone. Which basically “bricks” the phone as none of the preinstalled apps will work anymore. Well maybe the chess and the meditation app. But I cannot find a real use case for this phone (for me) that would work with the preinstalled apps. So why not simply shutdown the phone if you want to be offline and safe battery? I think this could’ve been way more useful (and in line with the idea of distraction-free), if this would’ve been a mute switch or if it would’ve controlled just one of these hardware components instead of all of them.
But what is really bad about this, is that I activate it regularly unintentionally when I slide the phone into my pockets. Really unpleasant surprise when you take out your phone at the end of the day, just to see that you missed some important calls. I got into the habit of checking the switch with my finger after I put it in my pockets and that works for me.
Security Patches
This is my biggest concern with using this phone. Especially for a “privacy” focused phone, the lack of security patches is crazy. Within 6 Months I didn’t receive any security patches, while on my last android phone got patches EVERY WEEK. Very disappointing. In my opinion nothing shows more lack of care for the customer, than the absence of security patches.
No multitasking
Multitasking in general does work, because it is built-in into stock android. But even though there is a soft-touch button where you would usually expect to open a list of the last opened apps, it just doesn’t exist on this phone. At this point I’m convinced that no one at Mudita actually uses this phone for themself, because I cannot imagine that they wouldn’t go insane over the navigation in this phone and wanting to fix it immediately. If you only want to copy-paste a couple of fields from one app to another, say for example contact details, you will need to switch between two apps multiple times. Each time you need to go back to the homescreen, open the appdrawer, scroll through all of the preinstalled apps and find the other app. Just really annoying and something that has never been an issue on any other phone for me before.
Microphone
It looks like there are two microphones on the phone. I don’t know if one of mine is maybe malfunctioning, but if I cover the microphone next to the USB port, no one can understand me on the phone, even when I have speakers enabled. And this happens regularly to me, because the way I am holding my phone, the microphone is usually covered by my pinky that supports the weight of the phone from below. Maybe just me and how I am holding my phone, but I never had this issue with any other phone and as far as I know, most phones have at least three microphones.
No notification center
This one really surprised me because this is actually creating a lot more distraction than I had with a normal smartphone and apart from the distraction-excuse, I don’t see any reason why this would be missing.
I have several messengers that I need to communicate with friends, family or colleagues. I have two different apps for mails (work and private) as well as multiple calenders. If any of these trigger a notification you hear a notification sound, but there is not even an indicator, nor any other way to find out which app got that notification. So now you need to open ALL of them, to check which one it was and if that notification is relevant for you. Especially when you are waiting for an urgent message, this creates a lot of distraction and it takes a LOT more time than using normal phone, where I don’t even need to unlock it to see if the notification is relevant for me or not.
Even better, if you use a smartphone you could customize very heavily, which type of notifications for which app should be hidden or muted. On the Kompakt you will always get all notifications. There isn’t even an option to disable all notifications for an app.
Even more missing features
I will just make a list of missing stuff I would usually expect from any phone. This is just what comes to my head right away, there is probably a lot more:
- No VPN settings
- I was convinced it cannot do screenshots because there is no indication when it took one and in three of four tries it will open the shutdown menu instead
- No no-disturb feature (how ironic)
- No horizontal screen rotation
- Generally a lot of apps don’t work a 100%. In a lot of apps I can not zoom or other gestures or UI elements are not working. I understand that Mudita can not and probably also should not support all 3rd-party apps, but it feels like there a lot of low hanging fruits, to get the most popular apps running a 100%, as most of them already work really really well.
Missing front-camera
Personally I don’t care much about a front camera. I could even interpret this as a security feature. However I would’ve liked that this would’ve been advertised (or disclaimed) as such, because it is just not something that you would expect from a phone in 2025. At least I totally missed it, when I looked through the technical specifications of the Kompakt. I guess that is my mistake, but it would be very easy to frame this as a unique selling point to inform the customer about it.
What I would like to see
So that was a lot of criticism, but again I see a lot of (unused) potential in this phone and hopefully Mudita learns from their mistakes. After all it is their first phone, so no one should expect a perfect product anyways.
And last but not least, I want to give my own opinion on the way forward:
I would really like to see that Mudita shifts the focus drastically from app development to OS development. There is just so much missing, that everyone is used from a normal smartphone. And yes, I know that this is not a smartphone but a dumbphone. And I want it to stay “dumb”. I’m just talking about the actual good and useful stuff we are used from smartphones, not the attention sucking hellscape we are used from smartphones. The Kompakt could still be way more user-friendly, focus on supporting the basic features we are need from a smartphone and makes these basic features work really well. A dumbphone should still be useful, otherwise it won’t be able to replace my smartphone.
There is still a lot in the system’s UI that needs to be optimized for the screen. I can see that Mudita started with that for dialogs and toast messages, yet if this would be done consistently for all UI elements, a lot of user-installed apps would work far better. I also experience regular crashes with ~50% of the apps that I download. Probably also worth to look into these. This should help a lot more users than e.g. fixing anything in the chess app, since I imagine these things will only affect a small percentage of the userbase. I really don’t understand the prioritization strategy of Mudita.
Similar I would like to see an optional google play service emulator, like GrapheneOS has, so that you could use all apps that depend on that, without actually breaking the degoogled design. That would probably help most of the users as it would unlock a huge missing chunk of third-party software.
And then I see a lot of potential in improving the screen readability/usability. Shortcuts for inverting colors or high contrast text would be really appreciated. I also think that for user-installed apps it would be really needed to be able to change the screen resolution on the fly. Even better if you could set that per app. I read something that sounded like this on the roadmap and if that is really happening at some point, I will celebrate, because that would be the first update with something useful for me.
I also find it a little bit sad, that no one at Mudita has yet thought about building features that would be otherwise impossible to build with a normal screen. Like for example, it would be awesome if you could “freeze” the current screen content and shutdown the phone, so that if my battery runs out when I’m on the bus, I could still see my connection or have my ticket available.
And finally regarding apps, please Mudita, consider to replace your apps with rethemed/optimized forks of established open source solution. A lot of open source software even already come with a set of themes for the user to chose from. Just add your own ones and set them as default. You can replace them slowly one by one and with each one done, you can throw a lot of tickets out of your backlog. From there on you only need to maintain the theme and pull from upstream from time to time.
And please consider replacing the launcher with EInk OS. It is far more superior in any way. It was done by one guy, who - judging from reading through the comments in this forum - seemed really eager to just help improving this phone, so you can probably work something out and even improve his launcher. Otherwise there are plenty of other minimalist launchers out there, that you could take inspiration from on how a launcher for an EInk screen should actually look like.
Closing words
That was a lot of negative stuff, but for some closing words I also want stress that I’m quite happy with my Kompakt now. I knew what I would get into before buying this and even if there were a lot of unpleasant surprises, I made everything work for me in end. After a decade of searching for a useful dumbphone, I finally have one!
