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.
I don't think people really want dumbphones, I think they just want apps that better support their self-control. Digital Wellbeing on Android is a start, but it's way too easy to bypass.
I wager some people want "dumbphones". A phone you open and just dial into without scrolling through apps. A phone with a simple screen that doesn't just gobble down battery life. So, like, a smartphone could fit this need with the right interfaces available.
I want people to stop thinking that their little quip to me is of the utmost importance. I want people to wait a few hours to tell me something instead of calling me while I'm driving and act insulted when I tell them to hurry up because I'm either driving or pulled over.
Ew, people call you? All my friends text, because they know we are busy adults, I'll get to the chat when I can get to the chat. Little monster stays on vibration only or complete silence until I decide so. I control the damn thing not the other way around. Everybody who knows me or I give my phone number knows that phone call means someone died, there's blood everywhere, or the building got set on fire. Nothing else requires phone call level urgency.
Phone calls are for urgency and very often I do need to respond quickly. I also expect and am disappointed when people don't answer calls from me because I only call for urgent matters.
Even if my father knew how to send text messages, his fat, dry fingers can't use the on screen keyboard.
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.
In the 2000s (very young at the time) I sometimes thought about how awesome it would be if we had devices where we could go on the Internet from everywhere.
I do not want the world back where people could only look things up on the Internet from home or work or where there is a desktop computer.
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.
People want phones that don't cost $1000+, lack basic features and constantly prey on their personal data. That's what they want. Some express that by saying they want "dumb phones", but the first part is the larger driver here.
A big part of the markup is simply the proprietary systems that run the phone. Apple's restrictive OS, combined with the planned obsolescence strategy for older units, corral their customer base into buying newer models every 3-5 years.
Android's open system allows for competitor brands to compete alongside the bigger publishers - Samsung and Sony and Lenova and Motorola. But even then, we've lost the more modular phone design to a hobbyist-hostile manufacturing strategy that precludes people from swapping out old batteries or doing basic repairs.
This, combined with data providers that try to bake the price of new phones into the subscription service (AT&T, Verizon, and Tmobile all offering "free" phone upgrades on painfully expensive plans) make the industry this extractive rent-seeking mess.
I think that last bit is more of a 'what you make of it' situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.
Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they'd only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.
If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I'd bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the 'dumb' version.
I think the distractions are partially a user issue and partially a company issue. Companies make their programs noisy with notifications by default that I only change it once I've found it annoying. They also make their program so bloated that they are slow to load and execute. By the time the app loads, I've lost my flow and now the tool is a nuisance. My mind is already cluttered. I don't need tech to slow it down.
I see what you mean. People use their devices at different levels. That may not be the best way to put it.
My meaning is that a portion of the users will be the type to spend a couple hours digging through each setting on a new device to set it to their needs. Another group will use the device with minimal initial adjustments, and tweak things as they find things they don't like. Then there's a third group that will almost never open a preferences panel and just use a device by its factory settings, likely to never consider potential improvements to their user experience.
From what you've said, I imagine your in that second group. I myself am in the first one I described; I look at the options of any hardware I purchase or software I download before I actually begin to use it.
Unfortunately - in the context of this post - the number of people in that third group I imagine outnumber us by multiple orders of magnitude, and therefore companies with shareholders to appease will always manufacture devices with as much bloat and advertising and invasive data mining as they can be paid to put in.
I used a nokia dumbphone and it was awful. Not awful due do a lack of features, but awful due to how poorly those features are implemented. Kaios is teal garbage.
But the form factor was lovely, and physical buttons are so much more precise and comfortable to use than a touch screen.
The phone that I really want is a small smartphone with physical buttons for typing and navigation. As far as I am aware that is something that is not made these days.
Sometimes I miss my blackberry because it had a keyboard and would read the name of who was texting me as an alert. It also fit in my pocket a lot better and the screen never cracked.
Wish they'd make a new model of that phone. I'd consider getting one if they could manage to not fuck it up with unnecessary features.
i just recently found my dumbphone (samsung intensity 2) from right before I got a glowiephone. It has access to email, apps for facebook, myspace, and twitter, and a web browser plus full slideout keyboard. So whatsapp, banking, and NFC shouldn't be difficult at all. Only issue is that unless the bank makes a dumbphone compatible version of their webbed sight they'd need to make a unique app for every manufacturor ecosystem instead of the relative ease of one android and ios app to rule them all. Or have an API for the manufacturors to make their own doggone apps.
It’s not about looking at them on that device, it’s about them looking good when viewed on any device, like if I text a photo to my wife and she looks at it on her phone.
I want a device like this to exist, but every single time a company comes out with an e-ink phone, there’s some huge compromise. Usually, it’s the camera.
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.
And I just want a small Android phone that fits in one hand.
The last one to be around iPhone 13 mini size is the Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact from 2018. And if you want original iPhone SE size, then the "latest" one is the Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 from 2011.
Oh what I would do to magically make my old Samsung S4 Mini usable again...
The reviews of the Jelly series seem to conveniently leave out how it is to type on.
I would like that size but I need to be able to type a casual whatsapp message every once in a while or add an appointment to my calendar.
I am considering buying something cheap and (relatively) small from AliExpress to see how that works and if it's a size I like. I'd hate to spend Unihertz prices only to find out it's too small for me.
It's great, but a bit too small and thick (...let me just stop you there), and the design is just not really modern or elegant. I didn't have problems typing on it, personally. But it's either the Jelly Star, at 3", or you basically jump straight up to 6" minimum.
Interesting, but taking it a too far to the tiny end - I don't need a phone I can hide in my prison pocket, just one that fits in my regular ones.
Also Unihertz has terrible software support and doesn't provide android upgrades for their phones, so it's already in a sense 7 months out of date - and sadly obscure enough that there isn't much custom rom development either.
I see you and me are looking for a similar phone. I want to be able to comfortably hold and use it with one hand.
As someone else mentioned Unihertz makes some smaller phones that aren't limited in specs but some may be too small for my tastes. I am still looking to see what would be a good size since I want to be able to type on it with some comfort.
The S4 mini wasn't quite that small, but typing comfort on small phones depends entirely on how comfortable you are with using swipe/gesture typing, as that's realistically the only normal way to do it - any on-screen buttons are just too tiny to hit accurately unless you go landscape.
Screen size stops being meaningful when you start comparing phones released years apart - the 5" Shift5me is 141,5 mm x 71 mm, phones around that width have seen screens all the way from the 4.3" of the 2011 Philips W920 to the 6.2" of the 2024 Samsung S24. For reference, the S4 mini was 4.3" at 124.6mm x 61.3mm.
But if that is an acceptable size of a phone, there are still few of those around, thankfully. It's just about the limit of what I can comfortably handle at all (Pixel 4a currently)
