In 2023, we reported on the rise in popularity of so-called “dumb phones,” the ones we used to carry that can make calls and take pictures but don’t do very much else.
The popularity is growing in 2024 — there’s a subreddit dedicated to it called r/dumbphones, with 55,000 users “finding out about the benefits of disconnecting through transition devices, dumbed down smartphones, and full dumbphones.”
“Dumbed down smartphones” are known in the industry as “feature phones,” because while they’re not for doomscrolling Insta, which we can live without, they have bells and whistles we can’t, like GPS.
The wrinkle is, while industry experts estimated 2.8 million such devices would be sold in the U.S. by the end of 2023, big companies would rather sell you a $1,400 iPhone. And you can’t necessarily just dust off your old Nokia and fire it up, because as many carriers switch over to 4G and 5G service, the older handsets will be able to connect less and less.
“The big tech giants don’t want anything that has to do with reducing your smartphone usage because they are not making money on the hardware of the device,” Jose Briones, who runs that subreddit, tells the BBC.
So just finding a modern handset that offers stripped-down features can be a problem, too — which is why he also runs a website called Dumbphone Finder, which helps pair people with less fancy phones that will actually work across a more modernized celly infrastructure.