If you follow me for even five minutes, you will find my disenfranchisement with modern smartphones is palpable. It seems to be a massive waste to have this capable device that sits in your pocket be nothing more for 95% of people than a doomscrolling facilitator. As such, I have wanted my phone to be the fablelled mobile computer that never came.
The fact of the matter is that modern smartphones are neutered in their capabilities when it comes to compute - they are not meant to be productivity devices - they are consumptive by nature. The huge screen and depressing input method means that the device is engineered for consooming. Couple this with the fact that everything on the phone is designed from the ground up to steal away minutes and hours of your daily life, and you have a device that doesn’t work for you so much as it works for the various corpos that run the “apps” which one installs to said device.
But, I think I have found a solution.
And as always, the solution is Emacs.
How to make your phone into that “pocket computer”#
While you can run emacs natively on Android (and pretty well, I’m told!), I would actually prefer to jump into computer that is free, open, and powerful. How I do this is as follows:
My workstation is on 24/7 and has a running instance of Emacs on it. I use netbird as my private mesh into all my compute, and this machine is no different.
My phone runs termux and moshes into the workstation Netbird IP. This creates a persistent, long-lived connection with my home network.
I run emacsclient in the mosh session, and hook into the running emacs instance. From there, I have access to a fully fledged emacs and unix environment at my fingertips. I can chat on IRC, read my feeds, emails, add to my notes, browse the web in plaintext, I can program, deal with git repos (that reminds me I have to merge Sneed’s PR in our Renaissance Channel) - anything I use my computer for, I can do inside this environment. It’s a full Guix system environment available, my entire infrastructure being a hop away.
This means I don’t need an email application, a browser (I keep Cromite around as an APK when needed), an RSS feed reader, an IRC application, or notes on my phone. The distractions are nil.
Is it the perfect solution? No - I still run into connectivity issues occasionally and don’t have access to emacs, but at the end of the day, it seems to be the closest I can get to that mobile computer. The phone becomes the window to much more powerful and open compute, without the limitations that are imposed on modern mobile operating systems.
Maybe one day, a linux mobile phone will be in the wheelhouse (I see the Fairphone is officially available in NA now), but I still think there are hurdles surrounding linux on the phone that need to be hashed out before it is truly ready.
Are you using emacs on your mobile device? How do you make your phone into that “pocket computer”? Email me or comment below.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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