I’ve been using a flip phone as my daily driver for a while now. The smartphone is still around, but it mostly sits in a drawer until bureaucracy or banking apps force me to use it.
For me, the benefits are clear: less distraction, more focus, better sleep. But I know for many people it’s not so easy. Essential apps, social pressure, work requirements… these are real blockers.
I’d like to start a discussion (almost like an informal poll):
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If you thought about switching, what’s the single biggest thing that holds you back?
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Is it banking? Messaging? Maps? Something else?
I’m genuinely curious because if we can identify the main pain points, maybe it’s possible to work on solutions or even start a small project around it.
So: what would need to change for you to actually give a flip phone a try?
I don’t use a smartphone enough to worry about it. If I am using my phone, most of the time it’s either Anki, Google Maps, or, like you mention, banking/government stuff.
Texting via SMS (or whatever it is these days) isn’t really a thing in Japan, either, which makes things more difficult especially as I despise talking on the phone. If, for example, I’m at the supermarket and wife remembers something she needs, getting that message is good
I used a flip/dumbphone for most of my teenage and high school years.
It’s like asking what would make me go back to having a DOS computer and playing Wolf3D after being in full body virtual reality with Half Life Alyx.
I have exactly one game and exactly one 2fa app that I would meaningfully miss out on switching to a dumb pbone, outside of those two things I would genuinely consider it.
I am actively avoiding calls and noone writes to me. If I were to give up a smartphone flip phone would be nearly useless to me
well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.
Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don’t encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.
As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.
Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City’s bus/metro app, and my city’s parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.
I’ve decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.
I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS’s special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google’s trash.
I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I’ve seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it’s just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I’ll have to see.
Dumbphones are ridiculously insecure, and they only support SMS communications which don’t have any end-to-end encryption.
This!
I hadn’t even thought of it from this angle. That’s a hard stop for me right there.
Any flip phone you can basically hook up to bitpim or a cellebrite or whatever and copy its entire contents in a matter of seconds. There’s no challenge. There’s no security whatsoever.
Maybe not a dumb phone but I would love to use a phone with an e-ink screen. I know there are some projects about this or some Chinese phones but I haven’t met an e-ink phone that I can install a custom ROM yet.
That would solve most of the issues others have brought up. It’s probably fast enough for navigation and definitely fast enough for banking, MFA, RCS/Signal, etc…
Signal.
And soon Veilid
I estimate that 60% of my phone use is for audiobooks while driving.
MFA & Authenticator apps
Web browser. SMS and calling are completely useless. I need a phone so I can access the internet outside. I dont want a dumb 20 year old phone I want a modern phone without the pointless bullshit.
My ideal phone would have a small screen, replaceable battery, shit camera, shit speakers, 5G, two USB C slots and be able to run android apps and be cheap
Same minus Android apps, like late old Nokia ones. Nokia stuff was perfect. Also UX is always treated today as if those tasks were impossible to combine with a good UX, and thus modern typical UX is just how you can do it.
Except late Nokia before MS acquisition disproves that by its existence. Its UX was better than any of that shit, with all the necessary things possible to do.
navigation, and living in a country where it’s really hard to find books
A flip phone/dumbphone would sort of be mutually exclusive with my use case. I use my smartphone nearly exclusively as a lightweight mobile computer for web browsing, SSHing into my server, and messaging over internet (not SMS). I rarely use the “phone” features of my phone, i.e. phone calls and SMS. So I’d be losing out over the features I do use, in favour of features I don’t use.
If you’re being distracted by your phone and a dumbphone works for you, good on you. I think most people are like me and use their phones as a small mobile computer rather than a phone though, in which case distractions are best handled with one of the many apps/browser add-ons/etc that block websites or apps.
I for one would go flip from Japan, Korean, manufactured phone. That could tether, mini tablet for maps or email or lemmy
My “smart” phone is rarely used as a telephone. It’s set to silent, all notifications turned off, blocks unknown numbers, transcribes voicemail and spends most of the day as a window to the world.
I’m not sure what, if anything, a “dumb” phone would add to my life, except more interruption, more administration to keep contacts up to date, and yet another device to charge and maintain.
presumably having a dumb phone that only does calls and maybe texts can help you stay in contact / reachable but without the possible distractions of the phone itself.
For me, my watch does this job if I need that.
