Smartphones are for Fortnite. Or for scanning your favorite news app. But are they for taxes?

A surprising number of people apparently think so. About eight million people used the TurboTax app to file their returns on mobile last year. Credit Karma said that 20 percent of its tax customers used their phones to file in 2018, and that nearly a third of them did so in less than an hour, which suggests they didn’t run into time-sucking trouble along the way.

Alas, I wasn’t one of them.

I’ve always entrusted taxes to my accountant, but when I was assigned to evaluate the process of doing one’s taxes by smartphone, I figured the software would be wizardly enough. My family’s situation isn’t that complicated: a couple of W-2s, a couple of kids, some miscellaneous income.

But my experience filing by phone felt like a chore, with a fair amount of grunt work, compounded by the small screen and tiny keyboard that make many tasks harder than on a desktop computer. There are about 463 things I’d rather do than read I.R.S. Publication 463 to figure out whether mileage is a deductible expense, yet when I summoned help through the TurboTax app, an agent suggested that I should. Other apps also raised questions I couldn’t easily answer, and I even identified an error.

I sampled three mobile apps, from TurboTax, Credit Karma and H&R Block. All of them said I’d receive a refund of roughly the same amount, give or take $40, so I was somewhat reassured that my returns were accurate. But even after going through the process three times on my iPhone, I had lingering questions, and I wouldn’t have been willing to file our return to the Internal Revenue Service without human intervention.