My Mudita Kompakt Journey: Entry 1
TLDR: Week 1 owning the Mudita Kompakt.
Find the previous entry here.
It has now officially been one week since I received my Mudita Kompakt. This begs the question: how is the experience going?
It has been… interesting to say the least. Let’s break it down into a few steps.
The Good: The phone feels and looks good!
First, the phone feels great to hold and use. It is on the smaller side and so fits nicely in my pocket. The buttons feel nice to press, as does the touchscreen. It also has a fingerprint reader that works pretty well.
The battery is also great. The website suggests it can run 6 days, for me since I am obsessed with preserving battery life and so religiously keep it between 20% and 80%, it lasts 3–4 days. Which is still way more than any of my prior smartphones.
FInally, the audio jack! I missed those. Time to bring out the wired earphones from storage.
The Good II: Chat messaging works great
One of the biggest reasons for getting a Mudita Kompakt instead of a dumbphone was the ability to run Signal and Whatsapp. So how well do these applications work? Extremely well. While there is no in-built app store, it was easy enough to download the Signal APK on my PC alongside with the Mudita Center (an official app to manage files on your phone). From there, I just needed to plug my phone in and transfer the Signal APK. For WhatsApp, I took a different approach, and downloaded the Aurora store APK. Aurora store is an app store that resembles the google play store but lets you browse anonymously. From there I downloaded Whatsapp.
Both of these apps work like a charm. Sure, if someone sends me videos I can’t really watch it, and pictures I receive are not in color. And the lack of selfie camera means videocalling is not really an option. But text messages are fine, I can read and respond to them. And phone calls work great.
This solves one of my biggest worries about foregoing my tradiional smartphone: the worry of “what if someone needs to reach me asap. Now, I don’t have to worry about that. I can keep my mudita on me and know that if someone needs to contact me, they can do so through regular channels.
The Strange Side-Note: Notifications
One thing that starts as a negative but ends up as a positive is the notifications. The base Mudita Kompakt does not have a notification tray or centralized way of seeing notifications. So you can’t glance at your phone and see immediately that you have 3 missed calls, 2 Signal messages, and one system update; you have to go app by app and see what notifications are where.
This would be a major annoyance, but thankfully, the Mudita community has an easy fix with various custom launchers and skins. I use Katapult and it works great so far!
The Bad: Maps, or lack thereof
That’s for the good. Now the bad.
First, the Maps app. I want to praise the team for creating a Maps app, but I have to be harsh: the Maps app is not good and is not really functional for me. First, when calculating routes, the app does not show public transporation options. I think this is due to the maps working only offline and refusing to connect to google services. But as someone who regularly uses public transportation, this right off the bat knocked off a bunch of functionality.
Secondly, the e-ink display means that when driving, updates were too slow. It is good for getting an initial route, but it indicating which of the three exits to take in a roundabout as I am driving, forget about it. There is also no Android auto.
Thus, I almost immediately stopped using the app, relying instead on my cars’ GPS when I am driving or my other phone. To be fair, maybe the Maps app is an acquired taste. Perhaps a few months of forced usage I would get used to it. But no public transport plus slow clunkiness makes it unusable for me, so I will have to rely on my other phones GPS for navigation for now.
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Finally, I have heard of other Mudita Kompakt users having success with alternative map apps such as OsmAnd. I may need to try them and see whether that halps.
The Bad II: Banking
The second ugly has to do with banking apps. I use an online bank, which has a cool security feature whereby when you log into the app from a new device, it forces the user to take a selfie and uses advanced facial recognition algorithms to make sure that the person logging into the app is actually you.
Problem: the Mudita Kompakt has no selfie camera.
Problem two: apparently the bank in question spent so much money developing the facial recognition algorithm they didn’t implement the option for their app to use the back camera of a phone.
Result: I cannot log into my banking app through Mudita.
I don’t know if I plug in a USB-C camera, the app will recognize the will do the trick. But for now, I was logged out of my banking on my Mudita Kompakt.
The Ugly: eSims
The third ugly has to do with eSIMs, and the hassle it is to get it to work. To set the stage, I use an eSimbut it is an eSim provided by my bank (one of their premium perks). Unfortunately, I couldn’t log into my banking app on my phone. No app means no eSim.
That was bad. And serves me right for relying on financial institutons.
No biggie, I thought, I’ll just get the cheapest esim I can get. After all, I didn’t need a lot of data since I wasn’t planning on using the Mudita for internet. Just enough to process Signal and Whatsapp calls.
I managed to find a cheap plan for 4 euros a month. I was impatient to test it, so rather than going for the physical sim card, I went for the eSim option.
Problem: This company required me to take a picture of my ID to make sure I was a real person and not a terrorist. This wouldn’t be a problem, but the Mudita Kompakt camera was so bad that after 5 tries I used my other phone to make it work.
So now the eSim is installed, but barely, and only because I had a second phone. My advice: use a physical SIM card for the Mudita phone.
The Best: Impact on doomscrolling
Ok so it seems chat apps work fine, but Maps doesn’t work and you can’t do banking on it. And setting up an eSim is a hassle.
But I didn’t get the Mudita phone for its banking or mapping abilities. Those were nice additions, but the main reason I got it was to stop doomscrolling. And so the million dollar question is:
Does owning the Mudita Kompakt stop me from doomscrolling?
And the answer is yes. Don’t get me wrong, when I am on my laptop I still binge Youtube and Instagram. But when I am on the Mudita Kompakt, I do not doomscroll, because I cannot doomscroll. Now when I go home, I can comfortably leave my work phone and laptop turned off and walk around the house with just the Mudita Kompakt in my pocket. If I need something with advanced functionality then I will get my laptop / other phone, but then the usage is intentional. The compulsive doomscrolling does not happen any longer.
One funny and sad anecdote is that I am so addicted to having a phone that I find myself compulsively checking the Mudita Kompakt. It’s almost like a built-in reflex. But here is the thing: I open it, see no notifications, and turn it off.
The Verdict
What is my final verdict? It is: it has only been one week I need more time to assess. Specifically, whether the pain points are minor inconveniences or major obstacles; whether the reduction in doomscrolling is temporary reprieve or a full on behavioral change; and whether my life improves, worses, or remains the same after purchasing the Mudita Kompakt.
Only time will tell. See you in one month!
