I've made similar decision few years ago, from a big city to a mountain (but well served) area. My usage of crapphones (one of the more meaningful and politically correct name for smartphone, the other less politically correct and more real is macro-spy) drop drastically. I still have a smartphone (moderately new, one of the less crappy I found) but it's at home just in case of specific needs. Normally I go out without any phone, for car travel I tend to have a classic Nokia just in case.
To follow the post smartphones now are like party cards of the nazi-fascist era, in the past they are just a means for those regimes to discriminate citizens, now they are "active" instead of "passive" they are not just a discrimination tool, the original social score, they are active surveillance devices that can monitor much of any human life, but reasons for me to live the city have gone far beyond that tech aspect:
- IMVHO cities now and especially in the near future are not anymore human aggregate for productivity, service and sociability but open internment camps, where very few can materially control and rule many more humans, like an intensive farm, outside cities it's just not equally possible, a dictatorship can disrupt services and life outside but not much surveilling and oppress a spread population.
- seen the public aspects of the Green New Deal it was clear to me that cities will be just receptacle of poverty and pain: we can't evolve a dense city so an already made city is doomed, no well done insulation and appropriate energy saving design, no room for renewables etc while energy costs skyrocketing and that's not just a matter of cost, also a matter of physical availability of a service. Without electricity in a dense city there is no room for individual citizens to backup.
- density issues already surpass the advantages and foreseeable and (fore)seen unrest will naturally be much bigger in cities than outside.
- in any cases being in a served enough area the investment keep it's value reasonably well in almost all cases.
Smartphones and "virtual/surveilled" life vs a less constrained and less artificial one is an important but marginal aspect...