Enshittification

In 2026, I set out on the goal to unenshittify my digital life. I am old enough at this point that I came of age when the internet was new and exciting and was built with good intentions. But for the past 10 years or so, it really has all changed for the worse. I won’t list all of my grievances, but I think I can easily argue that the web is mostly dead, Apps have turned into cesspools of addictive non-sense, Mac apps are all now Electron apps, and the reality is that what we have done with all of the amazing power of our modern computing devices is waste it all on heavy-weight frameworks, RAM sucking Javascript apps, and totally unwanted features. I am done with this computing contract. This is not what I signed up for.

I am starting to sound like an old man and that is OK because at least luckily I still have my Mac. Despite Apple’s best attempts they have not been able to suffocate the Mac like they have all of their other platforms. On my Mac, I am in full control of my data, full control of the apps I use, and in full control of the services my Mac runs. The iPhone on the other hand, has turned into a platform I absolutely despise. The App Store restrictions have turned one of the most exciting and powerful computing platforms into an addictive doom-scrolling appliance with little other purpose.

Complaints

The thing is that every App for the iPhone has never actually really changed. Whether its 2012 or 2026, every app is fundamentally the same:

  1. Download JSON
  2. Store JSON in a SQLite database
  3. Parse JSON into a list
  4. Fetch media while the list scrolls
  5. If I am being generous, on some chat apps there is some cryptography

All of these capabilities are provided by Apple and built into the OS. So all of these apps should be simple, small, and efficient. But yet they are not. You can pick your favorite doomscrolling app from the App Store and they are all 300MB+. Why is this? Well it is different for every app. But usually it comes down to

  1. Tracking frameworks
  2. Advertising frameworks
  3. Crossplatform UI frameworks
  4. Unwanted features
  5. etc, etc, etc

This combined with the fact that Apple keeps making the iPhone bigger, more powerful, and more power hungry, leaves me in such an awkward position. Since the apps are nigh useless for anything except doomscrolling, please tell me again why I need an 8” supercomputer with 12GB of RAM in my pocket? All of this stuff could be done with an iPhone 5 in 2012 if it wasn’t all enshittified.

Reaction

Thats what I am doing. I am switching to using an iPhone 5 as my main iPhone. Why the iPhone 5? Well, its the newest iPhone that can run iOS 6 and it has a widescreen and a lightning connector unlike the iPhone4s. So I could do a 5s or an SE and get the same size, but I thought it would be fun to have that retro design for the OS as well. Of course, I also have my lovely iMac G4 which would also benefit from the enhancements I made to the iPhone 5. This would later turn out to be a bigger challenge that I thought, but I will save for that later.

But the long story short, is my iPhone 5 is my day to day iPhone. I did also downgrade my gigantic iPhone 14 Pro to an iPhone 13 mini which serves as my backup iPhone when I need to do things the iPhone 5 can’t… like make calls, enable my Apple Watch (with Apple Pay), and use the enshittified apps that I have no choice but to use.

AI Slop

I will just say it up front. It is not possible for a single person working in their spare time to recreate their digital life without AI. I will be posting a lot about AI because it has honestly changed my life when it comes to programming. But for the doubters out there, what I want to say is something along the lines of the following:

All of our favorite apps and and services were all fully enshittified well before AI was a thing. These apps became 300MB bloated behemoths well before AI. AI is not going to ruin software; it was already ruined. The software we have to use daily is is 100% human-made slop.

But AI will help me fix that, and for that reason, I love it.

Invitation

Follow along with me while I unenshittify my life. At the very least you can have a good laugh at how much personal time I am wasting spending to recreate experiences that are already free. But don’t doubt too hard. For one, they are my experiences created only for me. And two, I think you will be actually shocked what is possible on these retro devices in 2026 when you have the right build environments, toolchains, and a little creativity.