Most of the people I know (including myself) are cyborgs. We are seldom more than a few feet from a device that we use to connect with people, tell the weather and the sports and the stock scores. Our phones know who our friends are and aren’t, where we’ve been, how much we’ve walked, what we’ve looked up. We touch them dozens of times a day.
Which is why it’s so distressing when we have to change them.
New Phone Day used to be exciting for me, when I was using phones to do fewer things. I would get a new phone, open it up, and as it was charging, jailbreak it and root it so I could install what I wanted on it. I stopped doing that when security updates got better and the app offerings got wider. I had a phone that looked a lot like this, and it must have been around 2007, because I remember T9 texting on it to post to Twitter-that-was.
Now New Phone Day is a jarring and alienating experience. I can tell that everyone involved has done their level best to make this an experience that you don’t fear and loathe. All your stuff can transfer over! Your apps, your background, your data, your music. See, the process says? Magic, easy, you should do this every year! So much thought has gone into esims and easy activation and not having much, if any, dead space where your phone number is in limbo. As long as you’re staying with either Android or Apple, it’s honestly very slick.
But then comes jerk, the necessary friction of change is unavoidable. My alarms are gone. I have to log in to almost every single app and re-authenticate myself. Where’s my library card? Will my crossword app even work on the new hotness? There are so many settings that didn’t even exist on my old phone. And there are settings that I had turned off years ago and didn’t even recall. I loathe haptic feedback on touch. It’s like a cross between a horse twitching its skin and waking a sleeping baby. I turn it off and leave it off. What font do I want? What ringtone? I spend 2-5 days relearning an interface that was seamless for me before, and I am kind of grumpy about it.
Even though I can see the effort that dozens of teams put into a fast and painless transition, I still feel psychic pain. I just want the comfort of knowing things without thinking about them. I want my phone to be an interface, not an object.
I replaced my Pixel 5 (functioning fine but hadn’t gotten a security update in over a year) with this Motorola razr, partially for nostalgia reasons, but also because the form factor means the damn thing still fits in a pocket, and my hands. In a couple weeks I’ll be over the grumpiness I have about being forced to change my behaviors, and will be able to fully appreciate the excellent new cameras (always my favorite part).
I think of this as a Progressive Delivery success and failure at the same time. In many ways, the teams that have made it possible to port so much from one device to another have been doing excellent progressive delivery, as have the teams that have pushed out OS and security updates to our phones, and updated our apps, and made the whole thing something that I never have to plug into a computer. They’ve included sensors that are speculative, for the benefit of future features. Truly, our phones are a marvel. But no matter what we do, sometimes customers will experience the dislocation and irritation of jerk, when the change is so large as to be uncomfortable and noticeable. I wish I could have kept using my Pixel. It was working fine. But the camera software was no longer updating, nor the security, and some of my apps were breaking. I wasn’t ready for it to be obsolete.