What drives people in metropolitan France to opt for this type of phone? First, a desire to go back to basics and disconnect. Indeed, in 2021, a State of Mobil report from App Annie, a company specializing in mobile data analysis that has become a global reference in the field, estimated that smartphone users around the world spent on average 5 hours a day on their phone, a third of their day. This is 30% more compared to 2019. The French are, for their part, a little below the average, with 3h30 per day in 2021 (2h45 in 2019). Without social networks, web, email and photos at hand, the dumbphone would therefore make it possible to recover “available brain time”.
Other reasons, a certain nostalgia for the first mobile phones, like the Nokia 3310 which made its comeback in 2017, 17 years following its release. “I think that kind of vintage nostalgia is still there,” says Noelle Lauber. “We also see it with Samsung which is developing its new Flip, we are coming back to a flip phone as we have known it. It’s a foldable smartphone that comes very close to flip phones.” Consumers who turn to dumbphones also seem to want to escape the collection of personal data operated on smartphones or are in an eco-responsible approach, smartphones being very energy-intensive, both for their use and for their manufacture and this requires rare and difficult to recycle materials.
In fenua, it seems that these concerns are not what drives consumers to choose a feature phone. It is mainly, according to the operators, a clientele of elderly people looking for an easy-to-use tool or companies for their employees. The robustness of this type of telephone, but above all their attractive prices are also arguments raised. If the eco-responsible approach is often mentioned by fans of the dumbphone, it is also present among smartphone users, according to Noëlle Lauber: “We have more and more requests for refurbished phones. People are trying more and more to go towards that. There is certainly a gain in terms of cost, but there are still many people who do it out of environmental awareness, to give a second life to the product.”