I have tried desmartphoning myself before. The reason was I do not need this expensive device with 1000s of functions and 1 day battery life, Id rather have a simple one that is mostly just a phone. I dont like typing on a phone either, prefer to use the web versions of messenger, whatsapp and signal.
The device I went with before was Nokia 8110 4G. On paper this was everything I wanted. Low price, 1 week battery, love the slidy thing, etc. Unfortunately it had two big downsides: it failed to receive most automated SMS for some reason (eg bank login tokens), and while it had whatsapp it didnt support whatsapp web, forcing me to use the t9 keyboard.
Then covid came and I had to switch back anyway to use track & trace app and other stuff. But now Im thinking again about this, do you have anything to recommend?
Best options i can thing of, in no particular order, are the pinephone, a pixel with grapheneos, a light phone, or a feature phone
If you’re on android then you might be able to do a lot of what you want with a custom launcher, if you search “launcher” on fdroid you should find a ton of really solid options
I guess a feature phone would be best, but it would be very nice if the particular model supported at least whatsapp web. Do feature phones run android in general? Nokia 8110 4G OS was AOSP based but didnt support it.
A lack of touchscreen would be a bonus I think, for battery life and practical reasons. Sharing the internet to a laptop so I can write to people is important.
Some feature phones do i think but i don’t know enough about them to have a recommendation, sorry