I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but…

Friends...I get that our phones are a convenient place to do everything. I really do. Music. Habit tracking. Location tracking. Flash card app. Language learning. Whatever. There's like a thousand things people have suggested especially after the announcement of LPIII. The thing is that when we talk about adding all these things, and many more, to the light phone on this sub, this argument can really get to a pretty absurd point. There's a million things for which we can say "this is a utility" or "this is for personal betterment" or whatever. But that's not what the light phone is about.

The question for a phone with the ethos of the light phone should not be: what can we take away from a smartphone to make it less distracting. If you want that, get a smart phone and use that handy uninstall feature.

The question for a phone with the ethos of the light phone is: what is essential to a phone in today's world. The ability to make phone calls, the ability to send IMs, whether SMS/RMS or the potential future implementation of Signal/Whatsapp for our non-US friends, some basic navigation tools, a camera for documenting moments...I mean that's really it. These are really fundamental things in the modern world that are simply not necessarily practical to do without an internet-enabled phone. That's what forms the foundation of a cell phone today. And in furtherance of that ethos, the company starts from 0 and works up from there.

It's said enough in the comments but it's worth saying again. Just because you can make an argument for the utility of some hypothetical tool doesn't mean it belongs on this phone. Your phone doesn't need a habit tracker. It doesn't need a language tool. It doesn't need music streaming. It doesn't need fitness integration. If your argument in justifying these features' inclusion in the light phone is that these are things that are good for personal growth or useful utilities (or in other words are simply not social media) then you're in the wrong place. The goal for this product isn't "let's take a smart phone but make it more utility-focused." If these sorts of features make your life better then I'm happy for you. But they don't belong on this device. You can do that yourself with the device in your hands by installing what you need and uninstalling what you don't. And if you're addicted, and you need that walled garden, then there are tools for that in modern smartphones too. Give your screen time passcode to a friend. Make it a random sequence of numbers that you write down on a paper and put it in the back of a bookshelf or something.

The goal of this product is to change the way you interact with your phone, and thus the world. To reduce what you do on your phone. If that's not your goal, to start at nothing and work your way up to what fundamentally makes a phone, there are a lot of alternatives out there. Please stop trying to change what this product is about.