seelmobile

The bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.

I did this for 3 years and reluctantly got a smartphone again after service / voice issues on my dumbphone. Critically, my dumb phone had no browser at all but could hotspot. I would bring my laptop if I knew I needed connectivity. The phone could only do phone calls and SMS/MMS.

I think the long period of actual inability to use apps was extremely helpful in breaking the habit. When I got a smartphone again I immediately uninstalled/disabled all apps including the browser and have had no desire to enable them. It's effectively a dumbphone but with hardware/software that is reliable and a good camera.

It was inconvenient but I came to appreciate it even the inconveniences for the reconnection with the world. For example, I planned a motorcycle route and printed/memorized the directions. It made the trip more enjoyable using my navigation skills and not hearing a a digital voice giving me directions.

I used a Jethro SC490 for those that are interested, it lasted a few years and a replacement battery is cheap.

I had a similar experience as you but ended up reducing my requirements and getting a dumb phone (Jethro SC490) with no direct internet access and the ability to set up a hotspot.

If I need anything besides SMS/MMS and voice calls I turn on a hotspot and take out my laptop. I'm "offline" by default but still reachable in emergencies.

I do cheat on the camera portion by using my partner's smartphone for pictures where I care about the quality.

You lose conveniences but the tradeoff was very worth it in my case. I have no plans of going back to a smartphone.

Agreed - REST APIs can include a field mask or similar for sparse selection on a single entity but you'll still need several requests to fetch fields on related entities.

I don't work in this space and hadn't heard of it this. A quick search suggests LetsEncrypt and Mozilla are intentionally not implementing support: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cansignhttpexchanges/153...

[Google employee, opinions are my own]

This was 'fixed' by Signed Exchanges[0] which sites can implement. This is (imho) a cool new web tech that got drowned out in the AMP noise.

[0] https://web.dev/signed-exchanges/

I prefer them because they're human readable and can preserve time zones if that's important

(Disclosure: I work at Google on public APIs, opinions are my own)

Google's proposed a "stability" semantic as a third option[0]. TL;DR no breaking changes in the Stable channel but you can add backwards-compatible[1] features in-place.

A permanent Beta channel that's a superset of Stable lets users choose how change-tolerant they are. This lets API producers launch features earlier, knowing they will only impact risk tolerant users if breaking changes are needed. Theoretically this reduces the need for breaking changes in Stable, which require a new Major version.

[0] https://aip.dev/181 [1] https://aip.dev/180

What about mandatory service announcements where you want to know if you reached clients before breaking them?