Saying 'I Don't Have a Smartphone' Is the Fastest Way to Escape Mandatory Apps

Ploum argues that the polite lie “I don’t have a smartphone” has become his most efficient defense against a world that keeps demanding app installs and QR scans. He counted 18 apps he was pressured to install in a single year—including separate ones for his toilet seat, flush, and ventilation—and estimates that using each for just three minutes a day would consume roughly 22 waking days annually. His core objection is the stack of ten unspoken assumptions every app or QR menu makes: that you own a charged, working, connected phone with spare storage and data, a valid Google or Apple account, and the willingness to hand over personal data. Any one of those failing—including having your Google account terminated without recourse or cut off by geopolitics—breaks the whole interaction.

The twist is that the claim is false: he actually carries three Android devices. His daily driver is a Google-free e-ink Mudita Kompakt running only chosen tools like Molly (Signal), a bike-GPS app, and transit schedules—no browser, no social apps. A repaired FairPhone 3 on /e/OS uses microG to spoof Google services for apps that demand them, chiefly banking apps that refuse to authenticate on a desktop but trust “a small piece of glass” in your pocket. A cracked 2017 OnePlus 5 with stock Android and an ancient Gmail account stays as a last resort for apps that defeat even microG, and he notes it still outperforms modern phones on screen, weight, and camera—evidence, he says, that new hardware is largely a scam.

Beneath the humor is a pointed critique of coerced digital dependence. Nobody actually wants these apps, he observes—tradespeople quietly agree with him, and salespeople struggle to justify them—yet installation is treated as mandatory out of fear and habit. The sharper concern is identity infrastructure: Belgium’s push to mandate Itsme, a commercial authentication app that launched with the explicit intent to harvest and sell personal data, shows how proprietary, Google-gated verification is becoming unavoidable for banking and government services, leaving privacy-conscious users with ever fewer escape routes.