I like the term MVC a lot. It talks to something I’ve been thinking about for a few years… what is the ideal amount of connection? Where zero isn’t great, but what most people have today isn’t either.

A couple of years back, I did an experiment. Put the iPhone in a drawer and tried to by the ‘dumbest’ phone I could and use exclusively for three weeks.

That period was the first time I’ve felt like a tourist in my own city. No maps. No internet. No train timetables. Added to that, the keyboard was so hard/slow to use that I just didn’t text anyone.

The TL;DR of the whole thing was that I missed music, maps, and a camera.

I didn’t miss texting, almost any other app, searching.

I’m a fan of what the team at Light Phone are doing in this space.

The experiment taught me that feeling ‘too connected’ is both a hardware and a software problem.

Even if we improve the OS and the apps that are on them, the HW can still vibrate, know our location, etc.

In both cases, I think we’ve pushed the boundaries too far. Our hardware can do too much and the OS and apps take advantage of it – and we’re the losers.

It’s not entirely clear where we go from here either. Tristan and co. are doing a great job and I’m following their work closely. But I’d love to see companies like Apple start addressing these things in their products with changes to their hardware – a less is more phone.

One other thing I’ve been thinking about too is some kind of app-store warning system. In the same way Apple tell you if an app has in-app payments, I wonder if they could also flag things like:

• While free, this app has an advertising-based business model
• This app is in the top 5% of most daily-opened apps globally
• This might be using addictive design patterns
• People frequently uninstall and reinstall this app

Rough ideas, but hopefully you get the idea. All apps are not created equally and consumers should be told that.

Final thought is that last year I switched to VSCO for most of my photo editing and posting. I love it. I never feel like my mind is being attacked when I’m there. I’ve not paid anything for it yet, but I think I will. After a couple of weeks using it, you can just tell that they respect you and don’t need you to open it daily, weekly or ever. Ad-based business models = root of much of this evil.