Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Perhaps crazy question: is it a good idea to have two phones now? One for making calls only, with as many apps as possible removed. And another phone for email, web surfing, photos, etc...?

edit: Oops, I left out texting. Which phone for that?

You still make calls with your phone?

Of course, amazingly that's one of it's best features, enabling you to actually speak to a real person. (it's a type of personal connection that fleshy robots have, for some reason, derided.)

But I digress, excusing your bad form of answering a question with a question, I am interested in your opinion of the possible conundrum of the two phone idea.

If you don't need ANY apps on your main number, good dual-Sim feature phone (but be extremely picky, some are utter trash).

The for all the smart stuff, Pixel 6 with GrapheneOS. You can confine various "classes" off apps to dedicated profiles, so they'll never know of each other, and you get a vastly improved security (multiple releases in the month) and significantly improved privacy.

Excellent, thank you.

phones had/some still have user profile/account option so you can do this on a single phone

Why is that feature removed by companies? It still exists in vanilla Android, but for some reason the phones sold don't have it.

My bad, I didn't knew you wanted a serious answer, I should have known that some people would seriously consider having three separate phones for texting, calling and everything else.

For a serious answer then: Rather than segregating phone calling vs the rest, if you want to go to the hassle of maintaining multiple phones, I would put sensitive apps (i.e. bank apps) separated from the rest.

But ultimately it depends on which threat model you are trying to mitigate. Most people would worry about protecting their financial information. If you are worried about possible backslash from a fascist state, you shouldn't use normal phone calls at all and switch to a privacy app.

OTOH, a dedicated phone just to make phone calls makes sense if your threat model is your significant other.