The Quest For A Minimal Phone (for my kid)

A long time ago, on a very early morning trip to some Berlin Bürgeramt I was surprised to see that the S-Bahn, U-Bahn and buses were full of kids going to school on their own. This was my first brush with the famous hands-off German parenting1,2 and the adroitness of these kids impressed me. The kids would ride the public transport freely without parental supervision and apparantly this system worked perfectly.

Years later while I was dropping my daughter off to school, I started realizing that I was one of the few parents accompanying their kids to school. So in true German fashion, I planned to let my daughter to go to school on her own. With reliable public transport available, all she needed was a phone to find us when she needs and share her location. Phones are banned in the school so most kids use the Xplora3 watch or a Nokia 33104 and keep them in the lockers. However I was looking for something that’s little more advanced than those devices.

The Criteria

I wanted a device that can:

  1. Send messages reliably
  2. Share reliable location updates
  3. Support accessories like AirTag
  4. Be usable for the tiny hands of the kid.
  5. Be minimal and configurable.
  6. Be secure and safe for a child.
  7. No social media.

The Hardware.

I struggled a bit to find the perfect phone that matches the criteria. Modern iPhone are bulky, expensive and fragile. Luckily I had a perfect device lying in the stockpile, my beloved old iPhone SE (2016). It’s a device that was the pinnacle of Apple’s industrial design5 at it’s time. The battery of this warhorse was dead but it was a perfect device if I could get it back online. After some research, I found a battery on Amazon6 and changed it using this easy guide from iFixit7. Miraculously, within 30 minutes the phone was back online. As a final step, I got a companion SIM card for cheap at my telekom provider that was perfect for this scheme.

The Software

Apple is great at privacy and they makes it very easy to have robust parental controls8 on the device. The latest OS that can run on the OG iPhone SE is iOS 15.8.3 which supports iMessages, maps, location sharing etc. This was a perfect match for my criteria. I created an iCloud account for my daughter and added it to my Family account. It was a breeze to setup Parental controls. Some of the parental controls I like are:

  1. Downtime
  2. App limits
  3. Screen distance
  4. Communication limits
  5. Communication Safety

With a smart combination of these features, I found the optimal settings for her phone. The Airtags also work great with this phone.

Final thoughts

This setup has worked wonders for us for more than a year now. It is a testament to Appls’s engineering that a device from 2016 is still chugging along with no signs of wearing down. This whole endeavour is possible because of the German cultural norms about raising independent kids. My daughter loves that she can use this cute little device and chat with us and her friends. Most importantly she plays freely with her friends after school and loves exploring the Kiez, just like in the old days.

iPhone SE

  1. https://time.com/3720541/how-to-parent-like-a-german/ ↩︎

  2. https://www.businessinsider.com/swiss-vs-american-parenting-differences-independence-freedom-culture-shock-2024-5 ↩︎

  3. https://myxplora.de/ ↩︎

  4. https://www.hmd.com/de_de/nokia-3310 ↩︎

  5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17989717 ↩︎

  6. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B083W6L5N9 ↩︎

  7. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+SE+Battery+Replacement/61303 ↩︎

  8. https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121 ↩︎