My Mom's Flip Phone Is the Best-Designed Device in Our House

My mother is 67 and lives about forty minutes from me, outside Zanesville. Two years ago her smartphone died, and instead of letting me set up a new one, she bought a flip phone at a pharmacy for $49. I was a little embarrassed for her. I am not anymore.

Over the past two years, I have received exactly zero tech support calls about that phone. With her old smartphone, I averaged about two a month.

What it actually does

Her phone makes calls, sends texts, has an alarm, takes blurry photos, and has a flashlight. That is basically it. There are no app updates, no notifications from games she never installed, and no settings screen with forty options.

The battery lasts around eight days. She charges it on Sundays when she does her pill organizer, and the two habits are now linked. She has never once run out of battery, which she did weekly with the smartphone.

The buttons are physical. She can answer a call without looking. She can feel when she has pressed something. There is no accidental video calling her sister from her coat pocket, which happened at least four times on the old phone.

The support calls I used to get

I went back through my texts with her and listed the problems from her last year with the smartphone. The top ones were:

• An app asked for permissions and she did not know whether to say yes.
• The screen font got tiny after an update.
• Something called "storage" was full.
• A pop-up said her phone had a virus. It was an ad.
• She could not find the photos her granddaughter sent.

None of these were her fault. Each one was the phone asking her to make a decision she did not have the context to make. The flip phone never asks her anything.

What she gave up

I want to be fair. She lost some real things. Photos of the grandkids come through as tiny low-resolution images. Group texts with the family are messy. She cannot look up the pharmacy hours or check the weather radar.

Her solution was to keep an old tablet at home on the kitchen counter, connected to Wi-Fi, for photos and video calls. It stays in one place. It is not in her pocket. That split has worked well for her.

What I took from it

I build software for a living, and I think about this phone a lot. Most of the decisions her smartphone asked her to make were decisions some product team decided to push onto the user instead of making themselves. Should this app see your contacts. Should you allow notifications. Should you update now or tonight.

Every one of those prompts is a small tax. For someone fluent in technology, the tax is cheap. For my mom, it was a constant low hum of feeling like she was doing something wrong.

Her flip phone made all the decisions up front, at the factory, and never asks again. I am not going to switch to one. But I do think about it every time I am about to add a setting.