Security/privacy. With a dumb phone you're restricted to standard phone calls, SMS messages, and (sometimes) email. All of which are ancient standards that weren't built with security in mind. Your network provider likely keeps logs on your calls and texts

There's literally no point. I already use my phone for phone things, not as a second computer.

I personally dont think you need to switch to a dumb phone to get those benefits, smartphones themselves arent what's causing issues its what you're using. You want less distraction just stop using those apps or turn off push notifications.

2FA app. 2FA via SMS is incredibly insecure.

Map and translation apps a close second.

Who even makes phone calls today? Not me. I need a device that does everything but phone calls more than I need a device that only does voice.

you couldn't pay me to go backwards in time, sorry!

see I was around before the age of the smartphone. growing up, I thought my cassette Walkman was the most revolutionary thing ever. and when PDAs were new, I would dreaammm about everything being on one electronic device.

smart phones have given me a freedom that younger me never had.

i no longer need to carry a notebook/memobook around, because I have powerful software on my phone that not only let's me note-take, but index and SEARCH my own notes. from my pocket.

i don't need to carry the 3 novels im reading at the moment because they're on the ereader app in my pocket.

contacts, games, all my news sources, photos, videos, all my media.

to me, this is still revolutionary tech and it has only improved my life

i think we are seeing a rise now of adults who were raised as iPad kids who never had to carry all their shit around the way us older individuals have. so they naturally would want to get away from it because they've known no different and they never had to live another way before that point.

its an understandable mentality from that one standpoint. but no, I will never give up my smart phone. i understand the reasons for those that do, but some of us don't really want to go backwards.

Dumbphones are ridiculously insecure, and they only support SMS communications which don't have any end-to-end encryption.

Not at all. It's really hard to live without the practical features of a smartphone, like web browsing and maps. What I need is privacy, not to throw it all away for a dumbphone.

I believe a lot of the benefits you claim dumbphones provide are all caused by abandoning social media. There's nothing wrong with technology, it's just social media. You don't need to use a dumbphone just to escape social media.

I don't use the phone part of my smartphone much, so thie idea of a dumbphone has no real appeal for me.

i don't want my phone to be dumb, I want it to be open source, front to back! The issue of smartphones isn't that its "too smart", instead we should talk about why the control of our phones aren't within our grasp, but on the palm of corpos and govs.

you want to use your smartphone while keeping it simple? Install less apps and disable ALL telemetry (this is where being open source comes in).

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it's just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don't need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don't want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it's 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn't fit in my pocket.

I don't have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don't find it much of a distraction.

My "smart" phone is rarely used as a telephone. It's set to silent, all notifications turned off, blocks unknown numbers, transcribes voicemail and spends most of the day as a window to the world.

I'm not sure what, if anything, a "dumb" phone would add to my life, except more interruption, more administration to keep contacts up to date, and yet another device to charge and maintain.

You may as well ask me to throw away me phone entirely. I don't carry a smartphone to make phone calls. I hate phone calls.

95% of that is spam. And an old dumbphone won't even have auto spam detection.

I use my phone to take pictures, send those pictures, look for restaurants, navigate to those restaurants, listen to music, etc.

So what you're asking for is to make the part I hate about phones worse, while removing all the functions I actually use my phone for.

No way. Life is way better with smart phones. Tap to pay, maps, always having a camera, always having my notes, working as a mobile hotspot, controlling my home security system. 25 other things.

This stuff used to be so much harder. I’m not going back.

I will freely admit there are some dangerous addictive and invasive aspects to it also. I’m ruthless about what apps I will grant permissions to. And I don’t browse the App Store getting tempted by their promises.

I think the appeal of our phones not having to be a computer and not needing all the same rigor and paranoia and extra steps of a computer was really exciting. But it hasn’t turned out to be true. So now I treat it like a computer and approach everything with that level of skepticism. And also treat it like the gateway to capitalism that it is and I am skeptical of anything that’s trying to take my data or money. I think with the right attitude it’s a net positive device in my life

Not having a private OS and messaging.

The best option as of now is the Punkt phone

I'm closer to carrying around a cyberdeck than a dumbphone.

I don't like either sms or phonecalls.

Pretty much because my smartphone is basically my digital Swiss army knife. Like even if I got a separate digital camera and MP3 Player, I also use it for navigation and to communicate with my parents and friends over signal, and like hell I am gonna give up signal. Add to that it's also my portable wifi hotspot when I'm out, my train tickets, and how I pay for things when I'm sans-purse, I don't know if I can give up my smartphone.

Would it be good for me to get off social media and to stop doomscrolling the news? Yes, but I can do that by going out and touching grass.

All my parking meters require an app, and all of my work logins require pressing a confirmation in an app.

A flip phone/dumbphone would sort of be mutually exclusive with my use case. I use my smartphone nearly exclusively as a lightweight mobile computer for web browsing, SSHing into my server, and messaging over internet (not SMS). I rarely use the "phone" features of my phone, i.e. phone calls and SMS. So I'd be losing out over the features I do use, in favour of features I don't use.

If you're being distracted by your phone and a dumbphone works for you, good on you. I think most people are like me and use their phones as a small mobile computer rather than a phone though, in which case distractions are best handled with one of the many apps/browser add-ons/etc that block websites or apps.

I'd like to be able to use Signal.

MFA & Authenticator apps

Signal.

As someone who always had some kind of PDA (CASIO digital diary, Palm, Compaq iPaq) and switched onto the smartphone bandwagon pretty early (SonyEricsson P800/P910i, Qtek 9000, various Androids and various iPhones) ... I don't think I could enjoy the experience with a dumb phone. I love modern technology too much.

I once had a colleague that religiously only used a Nokia 3210 (the newer 3G/4G model). Which meant 160 character messages only. No emojis, no photos (as MMS were expensive). He was also the kind of person to use paper maps when driving - incl. stopping to look for alternative routes if some road was blocked or jammed. That's definitely not for me.

The only way this could work for me would be to have some small PDA that can connect to the phone to use the Internet. And I appreciate that both devices have been merged into smartphones at some point.

Maybe not a dumb phone but I would love to use a phone with an e-ink screen. I know there are some projects about this or some Chinese phones but I haven't met an e-ink phone that I can install a custom ROM yet.

It’s solving device addiction with another device. Sure it will be very interesting to investigate phone models to pick from. Indeed we are good at tricking ourselves. Creating “windows” with no phone at all works better for me.

It would have to have Signal.

I’ve lived through the cell phone invention, to flip phones, to smartphones. They were terrible back then and I doubt that’s changed now.

Now, I do understand the reason why you moved back to one. For me, I just got aggressive about notifications and turned off most of them. I stopped social media tied to friends and family and am selective about what I’m on and for how long. Takes more personal willpower (or whatever) but you do get used to it in the long run and feel better.

I don't make phone calls and rarely use SMS. All the features I need/want from a phone would be missing.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I genuinely love my phone. It makes my life better.

well, I work in IT. So I am required to use apps like Teams for mobile and DUO 2FA in order to authenticate my laptop sessions.

Now, could I use only SMS/email 2FA? Technically yes. And I could just have Teams on my work laptop and have that nearby all the time, but it would be extremely inconvenient. Navigation would also be a big problem. Due to the nature of my job, I frequently have to visit a large number of different sites around my area. Having to open my laptop each time I need to go somewhere, open up a map site like OSM or Google maps to get the directions, print them off or write them down, then follow them manually hoping that I don't encounter random slowdowns or closures in an area I am not familiar with is basically a non-starter for me.

As for personal use, navigation rears its ugly head again. I often will be traveling with friends or family and we decide on a whim to change our destination for dinner or hangouts after based on times, appetites, budgets, closures, etc. Having a map app on my phone makes that easy to do. It would be impossible to do that without it, unless I had a near exhaustive knowledge of my whole city and surrounding suburbs.

Honestly navigation is the #1 thing. Random other stuff comes up, like my mobile password manager Bitwarden, or my various apps like my City's bus/metro app, and my city's parking app. Both of which again, I could make do without, but it would be extremely tough and inconvenient.

I've decided that the happy medium for me is to use as much FOSS phone tech as possible. That way at least the tracking and data harvesting is minimized and I am generally not supporting megacorps.

I use GrapheneOS, with mostly FOSS apps. The proprietary apps I do use are isolated with GOS's special sauce. I use Magic Earth for my navigation, which while not open source, the data sets they use are, and they are not google, and based in the EU, so far better privacy than Google's trash.

I wish I could switch to a flip phone, I've seriously considered it many times over the last several years. But for my lifestyle, it's just not feasible. The best balance for me is to compute ethically on my mobile. I have thought about going for the weekend with just a dumb phone, that might be possible, but I'll have to see.

There really isn’t anything I couldn’t replace my phone with a tablet that stays in the house for, and it has been a growing thought to switch back to a dumb phone.

I don't like talking to people.

Whatsapp. That's the only fucking reason I'm not using a dumbphone. In Brazil, everyone uses it. Need to talk to a company? Whatsapp. Friends and family? Wpp. Book a medical checkup? Wpp.

There's also the problem of cell phone fees being abusive when calling/messaging people from a different company.

The benefits of having a full-featured computer in my pocket are just too many for me to ditch it permanently if I have a choice. While it's certainly able to distract me if I let it, I don't think I've ever had it disrupt my sleep (aside from late night phone calls).

I think it's better for most (and potentially easier) to keep to the smartphone and just better control the applications that are on it and the notifications that they raise to make sure it isn't overly distracting you. This may require disabling certain pre-installed apps (e.g. Facebook is one I always disable and just interact with via browser when I want to). Another pattern to follow is adding barriers to the things that distract you most so it takes a little more effort to interact with your distractions. Hank Green's Focus Friend app that got popular recently is an example of that -- placing an emotional barrier on getting distracted when you need to focus.

But ultimately, we all need to do what's best for ourselves. Everyone's suceptibility to distraction is different and if a dumbphone is what works best for you, then by all means, go with that for as long as it's useful.