The Cost of Having a Janky Phone

My HTC Evo phone turned three this May. Phones are not meant to turn three. They’re meant to be accidentally dropped, or tossed into a drawer after waiting in line all day to get the brand-new iPhone. But I don’t have an iPhone. I have an Android. I always root for the underdog, and it is always a bad idea.

Whenever I send or receive a text, for example, my entire phone freezes up. I know I’m about to receive a text because whatever app I’m currently using stops working, and then the screen goes black, and then I get a pop-up message letting me know the system has crashed, and then I get a second pop-up message letting me know my home screen has crashed, and then the text appears.

I also only have white-skinned emojis, because Android doesn’t care about intersectionality. I keep telling myself my next phone will be an iPhone. I keep thinking about how that probably means losing all of my apps and contacts and having to start over. I don’t mind having to re-enter people’s phone numbers, but I don’t want to lose all of the Neko Atsume cats I’ve collected.

My phone alarm does not carry forward from one day to the next, even though I’ve ticked off all the boxes that indicate I want it to wake me up every morning. So, every night, I have to re-set my alarm before going to sleep. I also have to re-set my alarm ringtone volume, because it randomly mutes itself about 30 percent of the time.

Sending a text drains approximately 25 percent of my battery, unless I’m using Wi-Fi. Listening to Pandora drains approximately 60 percent of my battery, unless I’m using Wi-Fi. Not remembering to turn Wi-Fi off before leaving my apartment drains another 40 percent. I have not yet gotten to the point where I keep my phone plugged into the wall as a matter of course, but it generally requires two full charges to make it through the day.

And yet I still haven’t bought a new phone. I tend to run my phones into the ground, partially because there is never a good day to drop a few hundred dollars on a new phone, and partially because I tend to put off anything unpleasant and time-consuming. I still haven’t really started figuring out how I’m going to move out of my apartment, for example, much less where I’m going to move. I have a bunion on my left foot that I am “treating” by wearing socks with toes.

But now I have to put “new phone” on the priority list, because it has finally started to cost me something.

See, I spent last week in Los Angeles and San Diego to put on a couple of shows with friends and hang out around Comic-Con. (I’ll do a money roundup later this week. I believe I spent the equivalent of a rent payment on food.) On Day 3, my phone decided that none of my apps should work anymore. I’d open them up, and I’d get a message that read “this app will not work unless you update Google Play Services,” and then Google Play Services couldn’t update because there wasn’t enough space on my phone.

There is no reason why there shouldn’t be space on my phone, by the way. I delete most of my photos after taking them, or at least I delete the six pictures I take before finally snapping one that’s good enough for Instagram. It isn’t music that’s taking up space, because two years ago my phone decided to randomly delete all of the albums I had purchased on Bandcamp. It isn’t apps, because my phone always thinks it is running out of space and so I delete any app that is non-essential and save the rest to my SD card. (Neko Atsume is essential. It’s also the only game I play on my phone. I don’t have Threes or Other Threes or any of that.)

Anyway, the point to all of this is that once my apps went down, I could not use Lyft or Uber. I could still text my friends, because that was working for some unknowable reason, but I could not book any of the cars we needed to get from our hotel to the performance venue, or from the venue to the restaurant, or anywhere else.

And this meant I couldn’t contribute to the cost of transportation, and it also meant standing in a hotel lobby and whining “I really want to pay for the car, but my phone isn’t working.” Once it meant pretending that there weren’t any Ubers in the area, in the hopes that I could just walk over to the hotel concierge and ask for a taxi, but my friend was all “that’s weird, my phone says there are Ubers,” so we ended up doing that instead.

I was finally able to get Lyft working after uninstalling and re-installing Google Play Services, but I never got Uber back up, and that’s probably for the best. Still, it’s time to get a new phone. The systems crashes and the alarm ringtone glitch I can handle, but not the social cost of having to depend on my friends for rides.

I have put August 1 as my arbitrary “must have new phone by then” date. Which means that this week, I need to start looking into the cost of switching to an iPhone.

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