Why Gen-Z is going back to dumb phones in 2025

Time to log off

Analogue technology like flip phones are growing more popular, and for good reason. We’re all aware of the impact our phone addiction has on our mental health and attention span, and young people are buying up dumb phones to break their habits.

The flip phone is cool again. Whether it’s because none of us are able to go phone-less without intense struggle or a result of knowing how embarrassingly easy it can be to get our screen time up to ten hours – the hottest wellness trend of the year is going offline.

While many of us feel like we need to be almost permanently online to stay up to date on fashion, music, art, news, events and overall trends, more young people are going offline, and we’re jealous.

You may remember Ed Sheeran appearing on The Graham Norton Show explaining how he had gotten rid of his phone in 2015 after realising he had been missing out on life while touring. We couldn’t imagine ourselves logging off of everything except for emails via tablet, and yet the singer made a convincing case for ditching phones.

In the years since, we’ve heard celebrities speak about their disinterest in owning a smartphone, with Justin Bieber preferring to use a tablet to limit who has access to him, and Kate Beckinsale sharing her undying loyalty to the flip phone. 

You’re unlikely to see a bunch of twenty-somethings go completely phone-free, and even less likely to see them walking around with an iPad as their sole means of communication, but many are joining Beckinsale and buying up the long-forgotten ‘brick’ phones to improve their mental health and wellbeing.

You’re unlikely to see a bunch of twenty-somethings go completely phone-free. Image: Getty

The rise of the dumb phone

The phone many of us were slightly disappointed to receive as our first phone as we dreamt of an iPhone, the trusty flip phone is having its day. 

Affectionately labelled a ‘dumb phone’, people are either completely ditching their smartphones, or limiting their time on them to be more present, free up time, and finally treat their social media addictions.

It’s now so hard for most of us to fight the urge to spend hours unfulfillingly swapping between Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even the photos app, that the promise of analogue phones taking away the choice to doom scroll is as enticing as ever. 

Even creators, whose jobs rely on them being online, are posting about how much better their lives are after going majorly analogue, only using their smartphones to video and post to TikTok. 

Affectionately labelled a ‘dumb phone’, people are either completely ditching their smartphones, or limiting their time on them to be more present, free up time, and finally treat their social media addictions. Image: Unsplash

Some people are choosing dumb phones with Google, camera, maps and music functions, while others only have the most basic of options including texting, calling and adding events to a calendar. 

Receiving 135,000 searches per month, even stars like Kendrick Lamar are tapping into the dumb phone trend, with his company pgLang’s Light Phone. The ‘anti-smart’ phone has no web browser, just call, text, alarm, maps, music, notes and calendar functions. The first model sold out as users are clearly eager to reduce their screen time.

The urge to disconnect

It seems we have gotten to a point of being so chronically online, that we now dream of the time when the internet only lived on the one computer in our living rooms, and get surprisingly excited at the thought of being in an offline space. 

The ‘anti-smart’ phone has no web browser, just call, text, alarm, maps, music, notes and calendar functions. Image: pgLang

If you’ve ever been camping, you know the feeling of panic after seeing the SOS only icon on your phone, only to emerge from your trip feeling more relaxed than ever after going without constantly checking your phone for notifications. 

Now activities like camping, hiking, running and other hobbies that force us to stop scrolling are growing more popular. 

Analogue technology like cord earphones, digi cams and dummy phones are having a resurgence, and after the peak of Instagram and TikTok, young people are now excited by spaces like clubs that enforce a no-camera rule, while digital detox retreats are growing more popular every day. 

It sounds like we’ve all had enough of punishing our own mental health out of habit, and analogue technology like the flip phone seem to be a nice way to wean off of our smartphones.

Originally published as Why Gen-Z is going back to dumb phones in 2025