Home Phone of 2023

Obviously I havent had a landine since I grew up, these days I struggle to even think of people I know with landlines. But now i have kids of my own who are not yet old enough to have their own mobile, but starting to be old enough to be left home alone for short periods of time, I wanted to have a way for them to contact us in case of emergency. So I came up with the home phone of 2023.

📱 Hardware

I tend to hold onto my old mobiles until the hardware physically breaks, so my last few phones have busted charging port (Nokia 7+) or ended up a bootlooping mess (Nexus 6P) making them unsuitable for continued use. My partner on the other hand holds onto phones until it becomes financially unwise to keep repairing the inevitable smashed screen. So thanks to her we have a Pixel 3a hanging around in good nick, apart from a couple screen cracks. Battery isnt great but it’s usable for an old phone.

💿 OS

Pixel (and Nexus before them) phones have always been the best devices for rooting and romming - replacing the stock Android OS with a community-built OS. So it was pretty straightforward to install LineageOS on the 3a. Now despite being a four year old device it still gets the standard monthly Google security updates on top of weekly LineageOS releases.

LineageOS is basically stock Android, so I can make use of the standard Android features. This allowed me to create seperate user profiles on the phone. So my profile is the admin account, has my Google account signed in, lockscreen PIN, fingerprint security etc. But i made another one for my kids that has no lockscreen security, no Google account and permission to make and recieve phone calls. I chucked a couple shortcuts on the homescreen to dial mine and my partners phones, and one for 000.

🛜 Carrier

Seeing as this will sit in a drawer 99% of the time, I needed a plan that prioritised calls over data and had a long expiry date. I settled on Aldi Mobile PAYG15. $5 for the SIM and $15 top up that is good for a year.

✅ Benefits

On top of solving the home phone problem, having another random phone in the house has a numeber of added benefits

Backup

On my admin profile I’ve installed my password manager and auth apps. So if I lose my phone I have an easy backup.

Headphone jack

As is the way now, both mine and my partners phone don’t have headphone jacks. I have a USBC↔︎3.5mm adaptor hanging around, but having a phone that can run my normal music and podcast apps AND can plug straight into an AUX jack has come in handy a few times.

Home Assistant tracker

I havent toyed with this much, but I want to try this out as a location tracker using Home Assistant. I figure for school excursions or similar I could chuck the phone in a backpack and get a good real-time update of my kids location.

🚧 Issues

The only real issue with this is kinda inescapable based on the whole intended purpose of the phone. By nature of the fact that it is only needed every now and then, keeping the phone charged is difficult. It’s bad for the phone to stay plugged in permanently, and leaving it charged but off doesnt seem to hold a charge for long - probably cos it’s an old phone. At the moment we’re dealing with this but just plugging it in when needed. Can stay charging and still be used.