[Shawnj2]

Honestly that’s not something I had really ever thought about, how smartphones are mandatory for children in 2023. I got my first phone in 2014 when I was in 8th grade, a used iPhone 4S without a data plan, and because maybe about 50-75% of kids had a phone or smartphone of some sort and the school had WiFi I don’t ever remember it being necessary for anything, although teachers did say “you can look X up on your phone” a few times and I know some of the girls in my classes used Instagram (although I didn’t start using it until a few years later). I think having a smartphone as a teenager started to become more mandatory around 2016-17, by which point I got a new iPhone 6 with a data plan.

[DavidPeiffer]

I'm a couple years older than you, and got my first smartphone as a junior in 2009. The school had wifi, but students weren't allowed on it. The phone was handy for looking up things, but I was certainly in the minority with a smartphone. In that era, it didn't really make a big difference socially. Group texts were the main mode of communication.

A family member dated a school resource officer for a few years, and it was really jarring to hear stories about stuff he had to deal with from high school students which weren't big issues 5 years prior. Tons of cyber bullying, revenge porn, fake calculator apps that were fronts for encrypted storage, students with multiple phones, etc.

Phones were also way less powerful back then. By the time I went to college, companies were making apps multiple times bigger than at the beginning (like 1-5 MB commonly going to 20-50 MB). I could only have ~5 big apps on my phone before I was out of memory, and the phone died for good on the 2 hour drive to college.