[nabilhat]

I'm less focused on downsizing, and more on avoiding unnecessary churn driven by (popularly assumed) design or (Hanlon's Razor and my assumption) incompetence.

I managed to keep an android smartphone going for almost 10 years. At less than two years the Google Play Store would devour the entire battery in 9 hours, so I deleted it, and battery life rebounded to 5-6 days with normal use. Better than new.

Other android system apps began to unobservably consume obvious quantites of data with telemetry, so I installed netguard to identify them. Once those apps were identified I deleted everything I could without breaking the phone, and battery life rebounded to 4 days after six years of use.

The local police recently acquired a secondhand stingray and circle varying parts of the county with it cranked up to maximum acquisition and retention, for reasons perhaps related to unfamiliarity with the concepts of discretion and nuance and subtlety. Newer phones don't care, they switch to bands that old stingray has never heard of. My old phone couldn't, and calls simply wouldn't connect in or out when a certain Cessna was overhead (verified tens of times on ADSB). Clumsy dragnet surveillance on top of reduced service in legacy 4G bands broke my old phone. It outlived the world it depended on.

So I repaired a secondhand, rather less old, broken android phone, and now I'm trying out LineageOS. We'll see how far this one goes. It seems like a lot of effort and specialized knowledge to keep a smartphone usefully functioning longer than a goldfish. It's frustrating. I'm not downsizing, I'm avoiding the accumulation of things I have to figure out how to hack for maintenance instead of for fun.