If the Light Phone suggests that the problem with your iPhone is that it does too much, the Jelly instead proposes that it’s too good at doing what it does: too easy to get lost in, like a TV; too easy to do work on, like a laptop; too easy to turn to in a moment of silence or inactivity. The Jelly has all the basic stuff: It runs a version of Google’s Android, it has high-speed data and it supports the same apps available to any other smartphone user. But its anti-innovation is brutal: It has a tiny, 2.45-inch screen. Its approach to smartphone moderation is to make the process of using it difficult enough that, in more marginal cases, it’s simply not worth it. It’s an engagement machine with the resistance turned up as high as possible. Messages become shorter. Reading becomes more deliberate. An idle check of the phone is associated less with the rush of refreshing an app than with the tedious process of opening one in the first place. As an individual strategy, the device supposes that helplessness might be solved, or at least replaced, with frustration.

None of these phones are likely to draw many customers, at least compared with the smartphone giants, and they don’t pretend that they’re going to change the course of an industry. They would each be successful if they slightly reformed a few thousand customers’ individual habits. More important, they say things that the major smartphone companies simply can’t: that there are cracks in this relationship, and they’re not going to heal themselves. One day, the costs of festering mutual resentment could serve to make the problems worse: for the manufacturers, a decrease in profit, and, possibly in response, an intentionally exploitative approach to product design; for us, a decline in personal well-being that we don’t yet have the framework or vocabulary to even properly discuss.

They are the products the tech giants haven’t given us and probably never will. But they illustrate, at least, how narrow the industry’s imagination has become, and how much we wish for its expansion in any direction but directly, inevitably forward. They may also suggest a need to adjust our collective sense of what smartphones are, and why they bother us when they do.

Another world-altering technology offers a good comparison point: the automobile. We might enjoy driving, and we are miserable in traffic. We buy cars because we need them, and we might buy specific cars because we want them, and the best ones can make a bad commute more bearable. But the problem isn’t our car. It’s all the other cars; the cities designed around them; the roads created for and now clogged by them. Smartphones are now trapped inside the world we’ve constructed around them, and so are we. If we want to escape, it won’t be another phone that gets us out./•/