https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240515-the-dumbphones-people-want-are-hard-to-find
People want dumbphones, and they're not hard to find. Everyone knows Nokia. They still sell dumbphones. Easy. Done.
But what most people want isn't a dumbphone. It's a Dumbphone++. It's a One More Thing dumbphone. It's a dumbphone with amenities. And that's not wrong; that's what I want (and use) too.
The days of everyone just using SMS (in the US only) or everyone just using email (in the rest of the world) are long gone. We have WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, GroupMe, Facebook Messenger, XMPP, Matrix, and whatever else is out there. The core thing for a dumbphone to do would be enable communication, but when the group chat isn't available, then is it really useful as a phone?
I've tried this before and it just didn't cut it, unfortunately. I had to supplement the dumbphone with another device or two because my family's on Signal. I even tried to get them to XMPP but switching chat apps isn't a thing most people will do. So here we are.
People want dumbphones, but they aren't useful in the way they used to be. They're not the communication hub that they could be, because of stratified comms apps. If we had "a dumbphone with Beeper" or "a dumbphone with the modern equivalent of Pidgin" then we'd be set. But that's not likely to happen unfortunately. The best I could come up with is the Cat S22 with Signal and everything else uninstalled with ADB.