I’m packing for a family trip to an unfamiliar place. Given how this world works, I moved the SIM card out of my Light Phone 2 and back into my iPhone 11 Pro after over two years apart. And yes, I am grumpy about it.

I don’t want to use a smartphone, but I’m overwhelmed by the amount of bureaucracy involved in traveling and taking a vacation. I need an app to get on an airplane, to call a cab, make a reservation, look at a menu, etc.

The attractions I’m taking my family to (I don’t want to disclose my location ahead of time) has it’s own app that is a multiverse of crap. And this gets to why I really don’t want to use a smartphone anymore: It’s sold as making life easier for me, but it’s really about making it easier for them.

It makes it easier to consume their products, yes, but most of all, it makes it easier for them to process me. My requests get captured in a ticketing system, or molified by a chat bot. My attention is redirected with suggestions, deals, and offers.

My interactions get flattened into metrics that middle managers can optimize for their promotions and bonuses. All my purchases count towards one rewards program or another. That data is bought and sold a hundred times, but hey, I get a free cookie on my birthday, which they know because my birthday was a required field on the form I don’t remember filling out.

Life is allegedly easier with a smartphone, but really that means it’s harder not to use a smartphone.

A big reason why I don’t need a smartphone is that I’m in a city surrounded by stuff. I have it pretty good most of the time. I live near where I work. I can get around without a maps application. The signage is clear and familiar. I know where the cheap gas is. And a lot of essential places are walking distance, or reachable through public transportation. Call it infrastructure, amenities, or community. I don’t need to consult a third-party source of information when there are signs everywhere, and everything else is visible with the naked eye.

Anyway, when I’m annoyed this weekend because I’m reading a menu on a phone, or getting turn-by-turn directions that are unclear about which lane I was supposed to be in to get off at the right exit, I’ll picture the serenity of my Light Phone, telling me nothing and asking nothing of me.

Fairphone is on my radar as a repairabile alternative phone. And it’s optionally available with /e/OS, a polished Google-free fork of Android, which doubly puts Fairphone on my radar.

Recently I watched an interview with the team at Fairphone. This phone got SEVEN years of software updates - Fairphone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rePi1pjJcX0

Listening to Agnès Crepet, head of Software Engineering at Fairphone, she said something that caught my attention (emphasis mine):

We are also supporting… PostmarketOS… PostmarketOS is Linux-based. So this is not a fork of Android like /e/OS. And perhaps it’s not out of the box yet. We know that perhaps it’s not for my dad who can easily use /e/OS, for example. So it’s a bit more difficult, more for the tech savvy people. But we want to still nurturing (sic) those kinds of communities, because this is super important for the independence of the software.

I love to hear that postmarketOS is something the software engineering team of Fairphone is on their mind. And this quote is coming from someone who has the power to actually help. Software engineering support in this context probably means providing information about hardware drivers (and maybe the drivers themselves) so that postmarketOS can work well with the Fairphone hardware.

Crepet says supporting postmarketOS is important for the independence of the software. I may be reading too much into what she said, but I imagine that people focused on hardware longevity know that independent software will become necessary to keep their devices out of landfills. Fairphone beats the competition in terms of long-term software support, but it’s still future garbage after that.

I notice that despite Fairphone’s supportive stance toward postmarketOS, we don’t see the fruit of that support today. Only the Fairphone 4 appears as a testing device for postmarketOS. What of the Fairphone 5 or 6? That probably speaks to how under-resourced the project is.

I get it. Shoehorning a general purpose operating system onto locked down devices with closed-source drivers is a difficult software problem. I’m a software developer myself and I know how difficult it is to maintain a software project, and I work on a much smaller scope.

Go look at how many devices on are the postmarketOS wiki. There are tons, but nearly all of them are impractical to use. The postmarketOS team is upfront about the work-in-progress state of things, but it still falls short of what I hope for.

I wring my hands a little over the lack of postmarketOS progress because of how badly we need it, or something like it. We’re at a point where even old electronics are quite capable. We have to stop throwing them away. And the corporations that made them won’t lift a finger to help.

When Amazon recently declared a couple generations of Kindle Fire Android tablets end of life, that would be the perfect time for an alternative operating system. I don’t have the figures, but Amazon has the retail traffic and self-promotional power to put Kindle Fire tablets among the most popular Android tablets in the United States. That’s just one example of a relatively popular device becoming garbage before it has to.

Somebody needs to put commercial money into postmarketOS if it’s going to solve a problem in my lifetime. Obviously the postmarket team doesn’t make their own phone, but maybe the Fairphone could be something like a “flagship” phone for postmarketOS. The presence of a flagship phone could attract other commercial interests who want an operating system without building their own or making a deal with Google. Fairphone is an ideologically aligned partner, they just have to get there. It gives me something to dream about, anyway.