No, You Don't Need a Dumbphone

(Or I don't, anyway.) Some thoughts on why ditching smartphones won't necessarily address the root cause of excessive screen time.

Illustrated by Stephanie Vee

When I first heard that young people have been trading in their smartphones for dumbphones, my immediate thought was … what the hell is a dumbphone? As it turns out, “dumbphone” is Gen Z’s perferred term for our indestructible bricks, our beloved flip phones, Edina Monsoon’s small shoe.

I’ve been following this phenomenon for a little while now. While smartphones remain ubiquitous and comfortably dominate the mobile phone market, Google search trends point to a growing interest in the cellular hardware of yesteryear:

On the social media side of things, Reddit’s r/dumbphones community has grown to over 100k members, dumbphones are getting millions of collective views on YouTube, and TikTok’s dumbphone tag features more flip phones than a campus bar’s lost and found bin in 2005.

It would be quite easy to lump in the dumbphone trend with Gen Z’s general interest in “retro” Y2K¹ fashion and technology. Doing so would do a disservice, however, to the growing body of thoughtful writing² that has emerged extolling the benefits of dumbphones as a means of combatting smartphone addiction.

The Appeal of Dumbphones

It’s not difficult to see why returning to dumbphones might appeal to those of us who have grown weary of our unhealthy dependence on smartphones.

Dumbphone keyboards aren’t all that easy to type on, even if you’re a T9 texting whiz. Applications on older dumbphones are rudimentary, limited mainly to a cramped email interface and a so-called “web browser” that’s a pain to navigate. The screen is small and not all that interesting to look at. Games are frequently limited to simple things like Snake. Social media notifications? What are those?

Dumbphones, in short, make it considerably less convenient to use a mobile phone; they also make it much less appealing and addictive. While I can certainly recall the dopamine hit of receiving text messages on my trusty old Nokia 3310 twenty years ago, that experience paled in comparison to doing … well, anything on my current smartphone.

My iPhone 14 Pro Max is large, demanding, pushy, bright, flashy. It seldom leaves my side. It’s a salve for boredom, a constant connection to family, friends, and faceless strangers on the internet. It often feels less like a tool and more like an extension of my very being. I would be a little lost without it — and that’s a problem.

As I scrolled through Gen Z’s photos of their dumbphones, and their DSLR cameras (and their Walkmans, for some reason), I found myself longing for my early days of university, when my mobile phone was predominantly used for chatting with my parents and the occasional text after 6pm.

Will Dumbphones Actually Fix Anything?

On Sunday, while thinking quite seriously about taking the dumbphone plunge, I took a good look at my recent screen time statistics. I ended up admitting a hard truth to myself: even if I bought a dumbphone, it probably wouldn’t be very long until I was spending more time in front of my computer screen to fill the void.

What, and I cannot emphasize this more, the fuck.

Egads. Forty-three hours on Reddit. Sure, I was at home sick with full-blown influenza all week long and couldn’t do much of anything … but that’s still forty-three hours that could have been spent reading books, learning a new language, drawing on my tablet, chatting with my husband while trying not to cough up a lung on him … anything other than scrolling through Reddit. Even as I wrote that, a small, defensive part of my brain retorted with “but iPhone classifies Reddit as Information & Reading — I mean, it’s not like you were on YouTube Shorts!”

But that, folks, is what we call a desperate rationalization.

Here’s the thing: many of us have problematic relationships with our smartphones not because they’re entertaining and convenient, not because they reward the dopamine centres of our brains with those alluring little red circles. Rather, we have problematic relationships with our smartphones because we have problematic relationships with the internet and, more specifically, with social media.

For me, at least, I know that eliminating the smartphone itself would simply eliminate the most convenient means I have of accessing the internet. It wouldn’t fix the actual problem — not entirely. I also know that smartphones already come equipped with all the tools I could ever need to curtail my aimless scrolling, and it’s about time I started using them.

What’s Working for Me

My screen time statistics were a wake-up call, a stark reminder that I need to make drastic changes to the way I use my phone as an initial step in reducing my overall internet use. It’s early days yet, but here is what has been working so far:

1. Strict App Limits

I’ve identified the most addictive apps on my phone (surprise, surprise — all social media-related) and have set custom limits for all of them via iPhone’s stock screen time app. Reddit has been granted a generous two hour daily limit during this first week, but I plan to get that down to an hour.

2. Extend App Limits to Desktop Browser

It’s not enough to simply limit apps on my phone. For my desktop, I installed a popular productivity extension on Firefox called LeechBlock. I can use this extension to either block certain sites entirely, or set timed daily limits for them. For now, I’m using daily limits, but may start blocking pages outright.

3. A Simplified Homescreen

My phone’s previous home screen was organized chaos — a mixture of folders and time-sapping apps. I’ve whittled my home screen down to just twelve apps: eight on top, four in the dock. All of these apps are strictly work- and utility-focused, and only one (Reddit) is explicitly for entertainment. Everything else? Relegated to folders on the next page over.

4. Fewer Notifications

I changed my notification settings for most of my apps. I really don’t need to know when someone has replied to me on Reddit, nor do I need to know when Facebook thinks it has found a group I’d like to join. The absense of all those demanding little red circles is incredibly welcome and pleasant.

Closing Thoughts

We so often seek to purchase easy solutions to difficult problems, and I can’t help but wonder if the dumbphone trend is yet another case in point. That being said, if using a dumbphone is what works best for you, then far be it from me to discourage you. It’s entirely possible that my experiment in making my smartphone a little less smart will fail and I, too, will need to hop on the dumbphone train. I hope I won’t.

But if I do … I think I might still have a flip phone mindlessly eating glue somewhere deep within the bowels of my home office.

1. Why, yes, it does make me feel incredibly old to place “retro” and “Y2K” in the same sentence! Thanks for asking!

2. See, for instance, Ciara McLaren’s hanging up or Christina Dinur’s Smartphone Free Human.