Ask HN: Things to do on my phone

The free Merlin bird app will listen for birds around you and tell you what they all are, and help you identify them by sight.

https://www.pepysdiary.com/ Every day a diary entry from the 17th century. Today he went to see Hamlet at the theatre. Seems like an equivalent to watching TV for him, and went to have his portrait painted, no cameras then.

Heavens Above app is pretty awesome. I use it a lot when I'm outside walking my dogs at night time. It also makes locating comets (past tense now, I know...) easier, along with stars and satellites, etc. from your vantage point.

Shazam app for when you're out in the wild, and hear a song you would like to hear again later.

AIY Projects app if you want to play around with Google's AI and robotics hardware at home.

Robot36 app if you want to decode picture images sent over shortwave radio.

Bike Share app if you're in a city where you can rent their bikes. Otherwise, whatever the local one would be.

Google Lens app, for those times you're looking at something and want to know wtf it is, or how much it normally costs. I use it a lot just about everywhere. I know an awful lot about the plant life in my neighbourhood as a result. A lot of it is edible, and some of those actually taste good.

Oticon app if you have hearing aids and like to fiddle around with the settings in a way that you can't with the hardware controls.

FlightRadar24.com website for determining what that plane is that just about to fly over.

These are just a handful of what I use my phone for. I like to make sure when my phone dies, I feel like I got value out of it!

For me its about things to not do on my phone.

I disabled Safari (via parental settings), use an email account that auto-forwards everything to my main email, thus I can only send email from my phone, but not receive any (the inbox is always empty and I don't check my main email on it).

I only have apps that I use to input things into the phone (writing, taking photos) and I eliminiated everything that isn't designed to end at some point.

No Instagram or any of the likes, only WhatsApp, but muted so I have to proactively check it. I do use a news reader, which is subscribed to the RSS feeds of the sites I want to follow. No algorithmic curation of that content, and no ads (unless I open the sites that the RSS items link to).

Keeping one's sanity away from the side effects of tech these days is quite a technical job, somehow ;)

IMO this is a sign that you don’t need to use your phone as much.

EDIT: My response to your question was really flippant. Sorry. I hate how phones have become consumption powerhouses that eat into peoples’ lives instead of the ultra-powerful tools that supplement them, and your question triggered that nerve (though you didn’t mean to!).

There are lots of useful things you can do with your phone that don’t encourage consumption above all else.

One of those things is learning a new language.

I’ve been using Babbel and Duolingo to learn French. While they don’t replace language classes (though Babbel Live looks really compelling), they are excellent supplements and practice tools.

I recommend Duolingo with a huge caveat: the app is extremely gamified, complete with micro transactions (gems to protect strike freezes, extra hearts since you only get five and every mistake you make costs one), side quests and boosts (you’ll see ads to upgrade to Super Duolingo after every “lesson” and occasional ads for Duolingo Max, the AI-assistance tier). The website version has none of those. I only use the website version.

Search for good games in the vast pile trash mobile games: Gorogoa comes to mind

Start developping apps for your phone

Start modding the hardware of your phone (e.g. build a custom case)

Read books (modern phones with bigger screens are surprisingly comfortable for reading)

Research all the birthdays of your friends and safe them in the contact information. Your phone will remind you to send them a message on their birthday;)

I'm trying to cut down on my phone (Android) usage, and so far I've found these steps to be really helpful

- A minimal launcher like OLauncher

- Obsidian for note taking.

- Syncthing-Fork to sync my notes and phone gallery with my computer.

- Local Send for file transfer between any device and OS.

- Readera for reading ebooks.

- Rethink DNS to firewall and selectively block internet for applications or domains.

  - This helps a lot, e.g. cutting off Telegram and WhatsApp's internet when I've gone for a walk and just want to listen to music, but don't want to be bombarded by texts or calls. People say you can mute or turn off notifications, but I still subconsciously open these apps and get distracted.

- Grayscale or reading mode to make the screen black and white. Makes the phone more conducive to reading.

- Newpipe for the occasional one-off YouTube video.

- Harmonic for hacker news. I've found many interesting articles and stories here.

check out termux if you have an android. not sure is the ios terminals let you do as much. its pretty neat being able to run yt-dlp to download the odd youtube video or ffmpeg to resize photos or videos before sending them off. i have all my python and lua scripts synced with syncthing and they all work as normal. fzf gets quite a bit of use in my scripts, like searching tmdb for a movie, showing the results in an fzf menu, then adding it to a watchlist. i have another one that lists all my spotify playlists in fzf then opens the playlist in the android app. its kind of crazy how much you can do with it. i even started learning neovim a few months back just so i could edit the scripts easier on my phone and im surprised how much easier it is to use on mobile compared to other android IDEs.

the only other thing that comes to mind is streetcomplete which asks you questions about the openstreetmap map in your area. its a nice casual way to contribute to osm without having to do anything too complicated

Language exchange apps like Speaky, Tandem or HelloTalk - connect with people learning your language

Have a voice conversation with ChatGPT and ask it about everything you've ever wanted to know. have some really dumb questions about how, eg nuclear power actually works? it's a robot and won't judge you for your questions. have a messy social situation you just need to talk to somebody about? tell it everything and it'll help you sort out who's being the asshole and what a sane person should do. just have a talk with it while driving

- Read books.

- Read articles saved to a "read it later" service, like Instapaper or Readwise.

- Write thoughts and other stuff down.

- Play chess or other mindful games.

- If you have an iPhone, download the free GarageBand and mess around with making music.

- Don't use your phone.

Try things like https://tradle.net/. Its always one puzzle each day, great to waste a little bit of time but not too much. Aka good replacement for doom scrolling

I wrote an app which shows me which documents or notes I need to review

Typical documents include my short term goals, my long term goals, my marketing ideas, my coding ideas, …

For each doc I defined how often I want to read it (every 14 days, every month, …)

Once i read it, I update the latest read date

The app then calculates which doc I should read next

Keeps me of the doomscroll

iNaturalist allows you to determine plants and wildlife, all the while contributing to science !

Anki is a fairly expensive app, but it’s absolutely worth the $25. I’ve personally been trying to make my phone into an Anki-only device.

I've uninstalled all of the Social Media feeds from my phone. Whenever i get the itch to scroll through something, i've set up a RSS reader app with a bunch of blogs that i follow instead.

It provides relief for the before mentioned itch and i end up engaging with longer form content and often learning something, instead of brain rot.

I disabled email on my phone, it's there if I manually check it, but it never pops up, ever. Phone calls from friends and family, and discord from family are the only things that cause notifications.

I don't use apps for things if I can avoid them, even if it's a pain.

Ive been playing with Replit’s phone app; you can generate, build and run apps, and I believe it’s integrated with their new GenAI app builder but I haven’t tried it yet.

If you want something a bit more out of the box than simply playing a game, give animating a spin! Just a simple flipbook-style animation app, there should be plenty out there. No need for pose-to-pose or anything at first, just try abstract, straight-ahead animation. If you find yourself gaining an interest, it's easy enough to pick up knowledge as you need it (if you do want a jumping-off point, I'd recommend Alan Becker's series[1] on the 12 principles of animation).

It's incredibly fun bringing even the simplest of things to life, and really rewarding getting to look back and see how your understanding of motion and weight grow over time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4

Pop in some headphones, and play Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

The gameplay is pretty rote, but the soundtrack is INTENSE. The looong pixel graphic style is fun, and the enigmatic story is also fun.

Turning it off regularly and taking in the world around you in more depth.

My dad has an app that can identify tree species from a photo of the leaf. I can't remember what it was called but it was definitely better than any social media haha.

How about not using it and being bored - https://youtu.be/LKPwKFigF8U

Play chessk, read books, find a game (I don't game so for me its very refreshing... different than opening X/HN/etc)

Stellarium especially the premium version is a one time payment only is absolutely worth it for dense astronomical sighting.

Maybe read ebooks (epub) with KoReader. Recently I found out that I can build up knowledge instead of wasting my time...

chess.com - learn to play chess. Play against the computer choosing the ability of your opponent, includes not at all good!

I just found out RetroArch is available for iOS and has all the emulators I could want built in.

I queue articles with Instapaper and read them. I read books on longer journeys.

I'm unsure what to answer because I'm don't understand the motivation for the question. Do you have a goal in life to use your phone more? Or do you have something going on that forces you to kill time on your phone and are trying to make it be more productive?

ah!, amazing things,your mind,viewing and doing and a phone well for me,its making money with it and finding sex from it depending on your interests and needs, the two could be combined

You can do animal and plant recognition with it, I suppose.

Use it for doing things that will benefit you in the long run:

1. Networking with the experts of your field through right platforms. 2. Gain credibility by showcasing your achievements and progress. 3. Build your own distribution.

Turning it off and talking to a stranger.

Put it the fuck down

Why don't you ask Siri?

Watch a TED talk