John and an OG Pizza DAO member, shot on an iPad from the floor.
A Pizza DAO member pulls out the smallest Android phone on the market and makes an argument for it that has nothing to do with size. The whole point is that it is bad at the internet.
The phone is a Unihertz Jelly Star, and he wants the company to survive: “People should buy this because I want this company to stay in business.” He runs through the specs cheerfully, and then the actual pitch. “It doesn’t work for scrolling content. So I can’t doom scroll on Reddit. I can’t browse crypto Twitter.” His conclusion is the honest one: “It makes a phone less addicting and less interesting.”
But he still gets sent links, so he needs a way to move text between his devices. Signal is the obvious answer and Signal has a hard limit: “You can only link five devices. If I have more than five devices, I literally can’t link all my devices through Signal even if I wanted to.” The alternatives all mean another account, another login, another cloud server.
So he wrote his own. A browser plugin that syncs text peer to peer between every instance, no cloud storage, using only a lightweight relay whose job is introductions rather than custody: “It never stores your data, it just helps devices make connections to each other.” Because it is a browser extension rather than an app, it installs on the tiny phone too.
He bought it eighteen months ago to spend less time on the internet, and mentions a second benefit that gives the whole thing away: it is better for cycling, because of the pocket space.
The line he leaves with the interviewer is a small indictment: “This will make you realise how much screen space you’re wasting.”
And his message, which is aimed squarely at hardware engineers: make another small phone, because this one has a headphone jack and nothing else good does. Filmed on an iPad, from the floor.