Go check a place like AliExpress: plenty of those there.
It's not even as if dumbphones are amazingly complicated and highly dependent on complex software to work - the actual complex mobile network stuff comes inside modules that do most of the work.
If dumbphones aren't reaching people's hands in some countries the problem is in distribution or maybe lack or awareness: we do live in a Marketing-heavy society and people are almost conditioned to go for expensive branded stuff.
They've got a lot of referbs and knock-offs (and the occasional rocks-in-a-box scam), which is one reason why prices can seem suspiciously low.
Which isn't to say American phones aren't overpriced. But the way AliExpress vendors make money isn't by simply undercutting American retails. They still have to source their product from somewhere, and that often means cutting corners or using substandard parts.
we do live in a Marketing-heavy society and people are almost conditioned to go for expensive branded stuff.
The other side of the marketing-heavy society is constantly being burned by "discount" products that are low-quality imitations. Case in point, back when Black Friday was a big deal, retailers would often source cheaper versions of well-known brands and use deceptive advertising to convince people the big TV you were buying at a 80% discount the day after Thanksgiving was comparable to the one you'd have gotten the day before.
Buying "full price" is often a hedge against getting one of these bait-and-switch marketing gimmicks.
I suggested AliExpress because it's internationally accessible, but I've actually bough small cheap phones both were I am now, Portugal and were I lived before, the UK from local eBay sellers and even mobile phone repair shops.
It's stuff that costs 20 bucks and the reason for that is because the price of the electronics needed for that really is stupidly cheap nowadays as it's all so heavilly integrated and even in China stuff like circuit board assembly is mostly automated.
Going directly to some seller from China just removes most of the middlemen as well as any brand markups (though the seller is almost certainly a middleman since factories don't usually sell by the unit, at least not in my experience way back when I had a small business importing and selling electronics).
It's the same reason why a perfectly good TV Media Box will cost you €35 (including VAT and shipping) even though that thing has to have enough power and memory to run Android and something like Kodi on top of it, which doesn't apply to a basic mobile phone.
(I've actually made my own basic mobile phone a couple of years ago when playing with Electronics, though it wasn't that practical to use, since it was all stuff hanging from a breadboard and connected to a 2G module ;)
It's shocking just how huge a fraction of the prices we pay nowadays for consumer electronics in the West are markups.
Sure, more complex and expensive devices it does make sense to get it from a brand (though I would advise against big brands, or at least get something you can put a Custom ROM on, beause of enshittification) even if the quality of no-name-Brand goods from China is actually better than it used to be, because it's so much money at stake that the risks of scams, bad quality and inexistent support in getting if from random-Chinese-brand make it maybe not such a good idea for products worth hundreds of dollars (which would also favoured by scammers).
Simple mobile phones, however, are not "complex and expensive devices" nowadays and the same companies making €35 TV media boxes or €50 Single-Board-Computers (like the Banana-Pi or Orange-Pi stuff) have enough expertise to make basic phones and the price of those things is pretty low if you're not expecting similar features as bigger smartphones (i.e. no high resolution screens, not much memory or processing power, no high resolution cameras with good optics) since that's were most of the parts cost is.
But yeah, I get your point and I myself generally have a maximum price point for the stuff I'm willing to source from there since because of the risk involved, but if you're after a mobile phone that costs $20, just get two or source it for a bit more from a local seller in a place like eBay to be a bit safe when it comes to replacements.
I mostly just want a phone that doesn't want to sell me on new ways to use my phone that I don't already do. I don't want a phone that's constantly trying to get me to use voice search, or try out some AI feature, or a search engine, etc. I have a newer Samsung tablet, and by default holding the power button turned on voice search instead of the power off menu? I fucking hate that shit, it was thankfully changeable but it was annoying that I had to change it back. I literally never use voice search. I fucking hate talking to computers, I'm not talking to a machine unless it's actually capable of feeling offended if I don't
Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.
That depends on how many people want them.
Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want "dumbphones" bad enough to stop buying "smartphones".
Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren't what they want. Apple, Google, etc can't force you to buy it from them after all.
Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.
The real "sin" in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.
Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.
The issue isn't that people want dumb phones, like a Nokia 3310.
They want a smartphone that prevents all the the things they don't like, while still letting them do all the things they do still need their smart phone to do. And in 2024, that's quite a lot. Some places you can't even park your car without a phone.
Apparently they just don't have the willpower to not install the things they don't like.
I actually don't get it. Root that thing and you can make it as dumb as you want. People want to press buttons and everything works. But please private and secure. That's not how it works, not because of the electronics, because of thee greed and people. Nobody wants to learn basic stuff and anything should just work. No. Learn or shut up. Or pay someone who is willing to do it. The "companies" will be as evil as the consumer let them be.
I've just breathed new live into an old tablet that, because of all the Samsung Bloatware + system app updates was 95+% full all the time even though it only had something like 4 apps I actually installed and used, by replacing its factory Android with LineageOS.
Now, I have an EE Degree and 25 years experience in developing software, including years of Android.
It still took me researching how to do it over the course of two weeks and actually doing it took me 4 hours and was a massive PITA (I literally had to re-install the factory OS just to toggle the "Allow OEM unlocking" option because my first LineageOS installation that looked fine actually went into a boot-loop on first restart), though the result was well worth it.
(BUT, the version of LineageOS I have has a stupid bug and if I wanted to upgrade it to fix it I would have to compile LineageOS myself for my device, since it's not officially supported - and I used somebody else's precompiled binary - and I'm not sure if I have the time and patience for it).
This is me with all my experience in related domains and who actually did something similar for my brand new phone a few months ago.
Absolutelly, if you are lucky, have the exact right model, somebody else on the Internet did all the work for you in a nice video, the files you needed hadn't yet dissapeared from whatever file sharing cloud storage *#%$ they were place in, and you are technologically inclined, it shouldn't be too hard.
On the other hand, the average person out there doesn't have the technical expertise to even begin to understand what's going on and the whole thing would fail on something as basic as not having the right USB drivers on their computer.
All this to say that your expectation about what people in general are capable of doing is wildly of the mark.
Two words: future proofing. In many places, 2G and 3G networks are either turned off already, or will shutdown in a year or two. Especially with the dumb phone target audience, a phone that will become a brick in a couple of years, is most definitely not something they're looking for.
That's closer to what I was thinking. That is pretty neat though, now we just need to make it smaller and more modular, and I'm not sure of there is a CDMA option as well.
Exactly. If dumbphones made a comeback, companies would simply achieve it by presenting the user with a dumb UI while the data harvesting would still go on in the background.
I guess there's the valid argument that you'd be doing less on your phone so there'd be less to spy on, but there'd still be spying, and much of it would simply be shifted to the user's PC instead of a smartphone. Guess what, spying is rife there too.
The answer to stopping the spying is privacy laws that put people, and their privacy, above tax-dodging multinationals.
I want a real software dev team for linux phones. I don't have programming knowledge, but I can pitch in for a reoccurring crowdfund to pay them. The Pinephone is nice hardware, but Pine64 has always said that they're leaving the software up to the community.
While certainly not the majority, feature phones (known as garakei) enjoy a cult following in Japan.
Bear in mind that feature phones in Japan were a literal decade ahead of smartphones in terms of features. They already had features such as GPS, email, internet browsers latest 90s and early 2000s.
Absolutely. Sometimes I consider getting a separate Bluetooth keyboard, but I seriously doubt it would be similar enough to scratch the itch. I really miss knowing exactly where all the keys are by feel and typing without looking.
The name is silly but the Galaxy XCover 6 pro checks all those boxes as a new phone. It even has the old style notification light, different colors for notifications.
