I Bought an iPhone

Note: This post was originally published on 10/22/2026, but I really didn’t like how it came out so I decided to rewrite it

Hello, it’s been a while since I’ve written a post. Is part of the reason that I’ve been lazy about maintaining my site? Well, yes, SSL certificates are a pain, but the main reason is that my life is so damn busy, and I’m in a much happier and more fulfilled place than when I originally started this site.

My life has changed drastically, and the way I interface with technology has changed drastically too. I wanted to get some of my thoughts out on how I’m handling that.

Most of my early twenties were spent obsessing over personal security and not letting big tech get to me. This led me down a lot of fulfilling rabbit holes, like my love for developing on Linux (I’m writing this on my Fedora ThinkPad right now), but it’s also led to a lot of friction and sacrifices that I don’t think get talked about very often when people preach about the importance of digital freedom and independence.

I was using as many self-hosted tools as possible (don’t host your own email servers, kids), running Linux on everything, GrapheneOS on my phone, off all social media, and making manual backups of all my data all the time. I’d mostly broken away from big tech, but I was still online, just with a lot more hassle.

It caused so much friction in my day-to-day life, even my social life. When I daily drove GrapheneOS for six months, none of my banking apps worked, and neither did a lot of the apps I needed to get by. Half the time I ended up running the same apps I was trying to escape through sandboxed Google Play anyway. Sure, the sandbox kept Instagram away from my location, but Instagram still read all my messages and saw every photo I posted. And without anything automatically backing up my photos, I had to set up Nextcloud to sync them, which wasn’t always fast. That meant even more time maintaining a server.

At some point, the trade stopped being worth it. Between work, traveling, and spending time with my girlfriend, I don’t have four hours to set up something that’s more private but a little worse than what I’m leaving. So I have an iPhone now, and I pick services based on how useful they are to me.

I still self-host a few things, like a small media server, and I try to be secure when I can, but I don’t have the time I once did to dive into the deep end.

I think the phase I went through, where you obsess over personal data and independence, was an important part of making me the dev and person I am, and it’s one I think a lot of young devs should go through.