Stressed Gen Z Ditching Smartphones for Flip Phones; Attn, Data Harvesting, Privacy [View all]

The ‘boring phone’: stressed-out gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones, The Guardian, April 27, 2024. - Ed. The feature-free phone, launched at Milan design week, is the latest device to tap into young people’s concerns about attention-harvesting & data privacy📱
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It’s almost enough to make you stop doomscrolling: dull devices are now cool. The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to bin their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone. The latest model is a collaboration between Heineken beer and the fashion retailer Bodega. The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom, built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data- and attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with.

That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts - a 'Newtro' trend seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes, fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones. The flip phones boom began in the US last year and was fuelled by TikTokers posting under the #bringbackflipphones hashtag. HMD, which was behind the Nokia relaunch, saw its flip phone sales double by April 2023, while Punkt, which prefers to call them feature phones or minimalist phones, has also seen substantial sales increases.

The Boring Phone is a retro flip phone that proudly boasts of having minimal features. But Apple and Samsung are not under threat yet, according to Mintel.

Nine out of 10 phones are smartphones and dumbphones remain niche, said Joe Birch, a tech analyst. "There is evidence of this generation modifying their smartphone behaviour, with concerns around the negative impacts of being constantly digitally connected.” The move to offlining, or digital minimalism, is also seen in gen Z’s declining use of social media. Twentysomethings are also more concerned about privacy in an internet that can seem more like a surveillance tool for brands, governments and scammers than a place to pursue interests and find interesting people.

The problem with offlining is that the world is increasingly difficult for people without a smartphone. There are 2.4m households in the UK that cannot afford a mobile phone contract and 2m young people who have no access to a learning device, said Hannah Whelan of the Data Poverty Lab. “Most essential services are now online - education, healthcare, universal credit.” People who cannot scan a QR code to fill in a form or order food are at least at a disadvantage, and some systems require them...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones