I want to set up a ‘home phone’ network for the kids in a couple of different households. The kids are too young to have their own phones, but are currently dependent on parents to contact each other in the way we did when we were kids

My idea at the moment is to set up an old Android phone on the wifi in each house with messenger or similar, then uninstall all other internet apps and lock down the play store

Does this sound like the best option? If there a better tool that is still cheap/free and will be relatively safe for the kids to use unattended?

  • Simon Müller@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    8 months ago

    discord and messenger are pretty bad when it comes to privacy, neither even bother end-to-end-encrypting calls.

    Signal really is the best choice, but due to the phone number registration requirement, unless you’re fine with the one-time purchase of some prepaid SIMs or something, that might get a bit annoying.

    SimpleX is decent enough with calls for now (when they work), but connection times can be abysmal

    This is where I would jump to Matrix / Element, but Element is currently in the middle of re-making their mobile Apps, including the entire calling feature 🥴