It’s immediately obvious what the disadvantages are of living without a smartphone. Lots of things in modern life are more difficult without without the help of a smartphone. Smartphones augment our own knowledge and keep us connected to people, systems, and services we rely on. In my previous blog post I wrote about my experience living with only a dumb phone.

In this blog post I list the benefits of living without a smartphone that I have noted over the last 15 months. Some of these things I experienced myself and others are things I have read about.

I recently published an article on the Code for RentPath blog about running Dialyzer with GitHub Actions.

Read the rest of the article on blog.rentpathcode.com.

In January of 2020 I switched from a smartphone to a dumb phone. I purchased an Alcatel GO Flip 2 flip phone and, after a couple weeks of figuring out how to live without my smartphone, put my smartphone away in a box in the closet. I still own a smartphone but I only use it a couple times a year when I need to test something on a mobile app for work. While the transition wasn’t fun I think it was worth doing and things did get easier over time. It has been 14 months since I switched to a dumb phone exclusively, so I wanted to write a series of blog posts on the struggles of transitioning to a simpler phone and the benefits I have observed as a result.