Twenty years, two flip phones, and one app habit I never shook

Almost exactly twenty years ago I wrote my first cell phone app.

Not a website that happened to fit on a screen. Not a script I ran on a workstation and called “mobile.” An actual phone app — Java 2 Micro Edition on a Motorola Nextel flip, the kind with the stubby antenna and the chirp you could hear three blocks away. I built it to control my lights. This was 2006. “Smart home” wasn’t a category yet.

The lights came first

The lights were the project. I had rigged up something that felt like home automation before anyone was selling it in a white box with an app store listing. Relays, dimmers, whatever I could make behave — the usual garage-inventor collection of “this works, don’t ask why.”

On the other end of the chain sat a 50 MHz microcontroller with built-in Ethernet. Not Wi-Fi — Ethernet. A cable from the wall to a chip on a board, because in 2006 that was the straightforward way to put a device on your LAN. The microcontroller didn’t care that the idea was unfashionable. It just needed commands.

The missing piece was the remote control. I didn’t want a dedicated panel on the wall. I wanted the thing already in my pocket.

J2ME on a Nextel flip

Enter J2ME: Java shrunk down for phones that measured their RAM in kilobytes and their screens in “can you read it in sunlight?” The Nextel flip wasn’t a smartphone — smartphones barely existed.

So I wrote an app. Tap a button on a flip phone, packet goes out over the cell data path (Nextel’s data story was its own adventure), hits the home network, lands on the microcontroller, and the lights do what I told them to. From the outside it probably looked like a parlor trick. From my couch it felt like the future, delivered through a hinge and a numeric keypad.

I don’t remember every line of that code. I remember the shape of the problem: a dumb phone as the interface, a real computer somewhere else as the brain, and a wire protocol in between. The phone stayed simple. The work happened where there was room for it.

Countless phones later

Then life did what life does. Flip phones gave way to BlackBerrys gave way to iPhones gave way to a decade of screens that got brighter, larger, and harder to put down. I stopped carrying the Nextel. The microcontroller eventually retired to a parts bin. The lights got replaced. The app didn’t survive the platform — J2ME didn’t survive much of anything — but the pattern stuck with me: find the simple device, extend it just enough, keep the complexity off the thing in your pocket.

Twenty years of phones. Some I loved. Most I replaced because the industry decided last year’s model was embarrassing. Smart home became a aisle at Best Buy. I didn’t think about the Nextel project much. It lived in the same mental folder as “things I built when I had free time.”

Back on a flip phone. Back writing an app.

Then, in December 2024, I “upgraded” to a flip phone on purpose — and discovered the one thing I couldn’t live with was typing on T9. So I built dumbsms: a computer app that lets me message from a real keyboard while the flip phone stays the phone. The companion app on the device had to borrow a secret identity just to get past the manufacturer’s install gate. Of course it did.

I’m not trying to recreate 2006. The new app exists because I chose a quieter phone and refused to give up one modern convenience. Still: twenty years, two flip phones, two apps I wrote because the off-the-shelf world wasn’t quite shaped for what I wanted. Apparently that’s just how I use these things.

The industry spent two decades making phones into everything. I’m spending this chapter making one thing do less — and then writing the smallest possible app to patch the gap. Some habits don’t update.