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Despite the ubiquity of iPhones and Android smartphones, some people have tried to resist the pull of the endless scroll by adopting old-school “dumbphones” or modern “minimalist” phones. While it might be fun to go back to the 2000s, I think dumbphones are a dumb idea in 2025.
Limited Phone Selection
I’ll define a “dumbphone” as what the industry calls a “feature phone,” a phone that lets you do more than just basic calls, but not as sophisticated as a smartphone. Feature phones from the 2000s were touted as do-everything wonder devices similar to how smartphones are pitched now, but in practice, most people used them to make voice calls and send text messages.
In response to the dominance of smartphones, concerns about smartphone “addiction,” and even nostalgia for the 2000s, there’s been a small but growing movement to embrace “dumbphones.“Flip phonesare fun to play with, even if their functionality is largely outdated, but obtaining one can be difficult. First, you have to buy one. The most prominent vendors in the US are prepaid carriers catering to those who don’t want to spend a lot of money or target certain niches, such as older people who wouldn’t want to upgrade to a smartphone.
you’re able to buy classic 2000s-style flip phones made by TCL, Nokia, and others, but the expense might be hard to justify for an unlocked phone, especially since you can buy a locked prepaid smartphone for about the same price.
You could buy a used phone from eBay, but if it’s a 2G or 3G phone, you likely won’t be able to activate or use it anymore, since 2G and3G servicehave been discontinued in the US bymost major carriers like T-Mobile. I see in the “everyday carry” posts onr/dumbphonesthat a lot of users import Japanese flip phones. I find this ironic since Japanese flip phones had smartphone-like capabilities years before smartphones took off in the West. They even had features that never turned up on American phones, such as the ability to pick up over-the-air TV signals. I would probably enjoy playing around with akeitai, being a bit of a Japanophile, but this would negate a lot of the appeal people imagine about dumbphones: low price and high simplicity.
I Need Music and a Rideshare
Apart from the limited and relatively expensive device selection, I have a couple of reasons why a dumbphone would be impractical for my uses.
I love music, and I love streaming music on Spotify. I also have a large collection of CDs and a much smaller collection of vinyl. I tend to use Spotify most often because it’s right there. When I’m on my computer, I can call it up and listen to whatever I want. On my smartphone and tablet, I plug in mywired headphones, and music is just a touch away. Music is something I feel is more important to me than video, since it’s easier to have running in the background than video.
Another major smartphone usage when I’m away from home is ridesharing. Uber is important for my mobility. While Uber is accessible through a mobile browser, I wouldn’t want to risk getting stranded anywhere. This is why a smartphone is necessary for me. It seems like not owning a smartphone in 2025 would be like not owning a TV in 1965. It might be theoretically possible, but largely impractical if I wanted to keep up with the world around me.
Spotify
Spotify is a pioneer in music streaming. It features a vast library, impressive bitrate, curated and custom playlists, as well as offline streaming. Spotify is available for free and for a monthly or annual fee.
There’s No Such Thing as a “Basic” Phone Anymore
Aside from the practical issues of owning a dumbphone in 2025, it seems that the time of the “basic” phone has long since passed, at least in the US. While the flip phones you can buy today look like their 2000s-era counterparts, in terms of software, they’re radically different.
Most modern “basic” phones run KaiOS. Like its more prominent siblings, it allows you to install apps for functionality that is similar to smartphones, just running on less powerful hardware. You can surf the internet, listen to music, play games, access social media, and keep up with the news, the way you can on a smartphone. To me, this negates one of the key arguments of dumbphone advocates: the lack of time-wasters or anxiety-inducers. If you can install apps on a basic phone and there’s not much of a price difference at the low end, why not get a smartphone that lets you do more?
Other devices are marketed asminimalistic “dumbphones” with limited abilities. Still, they also tend to run modified versions of smartphone OSes like Android with the ability to use social media or apps removed. A good example of this is the “Ghost Phone.”
I Would Have One More Thing to Carry
If you look closely at the “EDC” posts on r/dumbphones, it seems like other posters have realized that owning just a dumbphone is impractical in 2025. In a lot of these posts, you’ll often spot that the poster has a smartphone along with their dumbphone. They’ll usually justify this using the same reason I did: they say they need a smartphone app for something, such as accessing rideshare services.
A flip phone could be fun to play with. It’s kind of fun to flip them, after all. A Japanese flip phone could also be a nice conversation piece. It would make my own everyday carry more complicated. I would have to buy the phone, in addition to the smartphone I already have. I would also have to buy a service for it. I would likely use a cheap prepaid plan. I would need deeper pockets in both senses of the term to even consider adding another phone. My Android phone can already make phone calls and send texts. I don’t need another device that does the same thing.
My smartphone can make my everyday carry simpler. The 2000s could be fun, but I’m not willing to go back to lugging around an iPod or CD player with me anymore.
I Mostly Use My Smartphone as a Dumbphone Anyway
I’ve looked at the dumbphone movement with curiosity, even though I don’t think it’s practical anymore. This is largely because I tend to use my smartphone as a dumbphone anyway. I’ve never been a “phone person.” I’ve tended to regard phones as utilitarian devices, even though I find learning about the minutiae of phone networks fascinating. I can recommend old-school phone phreaker Evan Doorbell’s recordings of a phone system that largely no longer exists:
I think my own phone usage comes down to my lifestyle and personality. I’ve always tended to be more of an introvert, soendlessly scrollingsocial media doesn’t appeal to me that much. I would much rather read a book, watch good TV shows or movies, listen to music, or mess around with my computer. If I’m going to surf the internet endlessly, I would rather do it on a real computer.
It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s How You Use It
The rise of the dumbphone movement is a backlash tosmartphone “addiction,“but I wonder if the smartphone might be a scapegoat for a larger problem.
In the 1970s, Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander built “Rat Park,” a stimulating environment where laboratory rats could run around, eat food, run in wheels, play with balls, and interact with other lab rats, as related bythe BBC. They could drink all the morphine-laced water they wanted. But with such a fun environment for them, they preferred ordinary water instead. This ran in contrast to conventional experiments with solitary rats in cages that would self-administer drugs to the point of death because the isolated environment was so miserable for them, rather than because the drugs were so addictive.
I wonder if the current discourse around smartphones might reflect a similar misplaced sense of cause and effect. If you lived in a cage, you might find yourself pushing the bar as well, or rather, scrolling through your phone. If you were serious about reducing smartphone use, wouldn’t you want to make sure your world, and those that kids lived in, felt more like a park than a cage?
The smartphone is here to stay. Rather than attempt to fight them, we can use smartphones responsibly while still paying attention to the good things in the real world.
iPhone 16e
The iPhone16e is an affordable addition to the iPhone 16 line, costing $200 less than the base iPhone 16.
