Robert Triggs / Android Authority
I had this realization — epiphany of sorts — that while we’ve become more conscious of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, we often use AI much more than we actively perceive. Every app you touch on your phone has some kind of smarts and automation baked in. It’s constantly learning from your patterns and improving in the background.
That nudged me to experiment with becoming more intentional about these AI additions and disable them for a cleaner look and feel. No smart suggestions I mindlessly use, no Assistant to speak to, and no on-device smarts. All turned off.
I enthusiastically planned to do this for a week, but I soon realized I was being too optimistic. What sounded like a solid digital detox plan turned into a quiet reckoning: my phone is a well-oiled system with subtle automations I don’t think I can live without anymore.
How smart do you like your smartphone to be? 24 votes I like my phone as basic as possible 29 % I like to balance — smart where needed 58 % Give me all the AI, everywhere 13 %
This is the most digitally impaired I’ve felt
Andy Walker / Android Authority
I imagined turning off smart features across all my main apps would feel like going back to the good-old Nokia bar phone days. Nostalgia made that seem enticing — something I thought I’d actually want — but practically, it was far from rosy.
The most frustrated I got during my time off AI was with Gboard. Without swipe typing, predictive text, and autocorrect — the very features we all love to meme about — my entire phone felt broken. The number and variety of misspellings I could come up with made me question my self-worth as a writer. And fixing each one of them made me a painfully slow typist. Group chats would often move on from a topic by the time I’d finished typing my take — total Internet Explorer–style late blooming.
In Google Photos, edits became much more manual. While I enjoy playing with contrast and tone and whatnot myself, I really missed the one-tap fixes that helped with lighting and gave me a quick, clean version to share on Instagram or at least build on. More importantly, I couldn’t use any of the smart editing features you get a Pixel for — Magic Editor, Photo Unblur, Best Take. Without them, it was like going back to the cave days of modern tech (2010, I mean).
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