In 2024, the global market for these brick phones pulled in $2.35 billion. That’s bugger all compared to the smartphone racket, but you can’t deny the trend—since 2018, internet searches for “dumbphone” have gone through the roof, up 89%. Even heaps of young nippers are getting keen on the idea, looking to cut down on screen time and give their noggins a rest.
The boffins are reckonin’ this market for “dumb” phones will keep growing by about 2.3% every year ’til 2031
So what’s the big deal, and what’s the bloody point of switching to a dumbphone? Let’s have a squiz.
Basically, people are absolutely jack of being glued to their screens 24/7 and are looking for a way to switch off and find some focus. For a lot of people, smartphones are a one-way ticket to social media addiction, gaming all night, and copping massive data bills. It’s all about getting a bit of that digital detox and getting your head straight. Young blokes and sheilas, the Gen Z lot, are surprisingly leading the charge, keen to get off the internet and social media for a bit.
When you make the switch, you’re not just getting a phone, you’re getting your life back. Instead of scrolling through endless crap, you can actually force yourself to be productive, read a book, or just be in the moment^1. It’s a choice for a simpler life, better sleep, and a healthier tech-life balance. The best part? They’re cheap as chips and the battery lasts for bloody ages.
Of course, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. The experts reckon that once you’ve had a smartphone, the chances of going back to a dumbphone are bugger all, especially for the young’uns. That’s ’cause all their mates are on social media, and a dumbphone means you’re cut off from the group chat. So while the idea’s great, actually doing it can be a tough ask if you don’t wanna lose touch with your mates.
At the end of the day, this dumbphone thing is a fair dinkum movement. It’s not about replacing smartphones altogether^10,^ but about having a good hard look at how much time we spend on them and choosing a bit of digital peace and quiet instead of the constant noise. It’s a top little trend for anyone who’s had enough of the whole shebang and just wants things to be simple again.
Righto, so a dumbphone is basically a phone without all the usual smart-arse functions. There’s no social media, no streaming, no app stores, none of that crap. All it does is make calls, send SMSes, and if you’re lucky, you can check your email. Oh, and you can have a go at Snake, of course).
So why would anyone tell their smartphone to get stuffed and switch to a dumbphone?
The head games
A smartphone’s gone from being a useful tool to being a constant source of the shits. A poll of 9,000 people by some analytics mob, Canalys, found that 47% of ’em feel like they spend too much time glued to their phone and can’t bloody well put it down. Some study from Harvard Uni showed that using social media lights up the same parts of your noggin as doing drugs. Smartphone apps are designed on purpose to mess with your dopamine system—the endless scroll, the notifications, the algorithms—it’s all geared to keep you hooked even when you’re completely rooted.
Righto, check this out. A 2023 study in Nature reckoned that even having a switched-off smartphone on the desk made people’s brain power go down the gurgler compared to a group whose phones were in another room. Then another lot of researchers in Frontiers in Psychiatry back in 2021 found that a whopping 68.7% of people totally hooked on their phones were copping shocking sleep.
Social media just makes you compare yourself to others, gives you a bad case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and sends you into a spin. According to the Royal Society for Public Health, cutting down on screen time chills out anxiety and depression. Scrolling through your feed just craps all over your self-esteem, stuffs your ability to concentrate for more than five minutes, and can send you down the drain—especially for the young ‘uns.
That’s why a lot of people are grabbing a dumbphone as a full-on, but bloody effective, tool. Unlike a smartphone, there’s just bugger all to scroll through.
Now, you might reckon, “Why not just delete all the crap apps or whack a time limit on ’em?” But, fair dinkum, I reckon people are just wired that way—if you’re gonna quit something, you go the whole hog and do it properly).
And even though it’s a radical move, ditching the smartphone gives you results almost straight away. Switching to a dumbphone directly takes the pressure off your noggin. A study in Computers in Human Behaviour showed that people who cut back on their phone use reckoned their concentration and memory were heaps better. So users are talking about a “base-level calm” — your thoughts slow down, you’re more on the ball, and that feeling of always having to react just pisses off. The anxiety from news feeds and comparing yourself to other clowns takes a massive dive as well.
Nostalgia and the noughties vibe
Besides being jack of endless social media feeds, there’s another interesting trend going on—it’s just become bloody fashionable.
This whole craze for bringing back the noughties style kicked off with young American influencers back in 2022 under the hashtag #bringbackflipphones.
The video that started the whole shebang copped 14 million views, the hashtag itself got mentioned more than 27 million times, and a similar one, #flipphone, scored a massive 600 million mentions. The ironic thing is that the hashtags and the fashion trend itself are spreading on social media, which you can’t even bloody use on an old phone.
All this hype is ’cause for the Gen Z lot, whose childhood was the start of mobile phones, these brick phones are linked to a cruisier time. They’re digging up old models on marketplaces, covering them in stickers, and snapping pics and vids with that full-on noughties aesthetic. According to Mads Silberbauer, the big boss at HMD/Nokia, “people want to go back to the early 2000s or the 90s—it’s a memory of happier and simpler times.”
Privacy and keeping your stuff to yourself
Another big reason people are jumping ship to dumbphones is ’cause they’re getting the shits with their privacy and security.
Smartphones are absolute data vacuums, hoovering up heaps of your private info. A lot of people have noticed it: you just have a yarn about something out loud, and bam, ads for it are popping up everywhere. It’s bloody creepy at best and makes you feel like you’re being watched 24/7. An old phone doesn’t have a cloud account, GPS that knows what room you’re in, or behavioural tracking for ads—it’s just too dumb to spy on you.
A lot of mums and dads are grabbing a dumbphone as their kid’s first device—it keeps them in touch without all the dodgy content and social media crap.
The hard yards of making the switch
Look, to be dead honest, I couldn’t chuck my smartphone. Cabs, maps, banking apps, food delivery, online shopping—all the usual day-to-day stuff is sorted on the smartphone.
For a lot of people, switching to a dumbphone feels like a total culture shock. You basically have to learn how to live all over again. That’s why a lot of people, in my opinion, make a weird compromise—they rock two phones at the same time. A dumbphone for calls and texts, and a smartphone for all the modern-day life admin.
That Canalys poll backs it up, showing that giving up your smartphone completely is a mission and a half—only 18% of people would even think about doing it for good.
Yuval Noah Harari, the bloke who wrote Sapiens, nailed this situation in one of his interviews: “For years I didn’t even have a smartphone. Now it’s become nearly impossible—too many services need it: banks, doctors. So I use it like an old phone from the 90s: calls, the odd SMS, and only the apps I absolutely can’t avoid. I usually don’t even carry it on me—it’s not here with me now, I left it at home.”
Harari also added: “The idea that I’m smart enough and strong enough to take on a smartphone—that’s just bullshit. Some of the smartest people in the world spent years working to make this thing able to mess with my head. And I don’t want to give it too much access.”
As far as I’m concerned, that’s a bloody perfect illustration of the right way to handle tech and find a balance—tell all the pointless crap to get stuffed, and only use what you need. Let your smartphone be a useful device, a tool for getting stuff done, not a cop in your pocket or your slave master, some manipulative bastard that screws with your head.