Dumbphones and the spam filtering tradeoff

2025-11-06T16:12:00Z

I'll admit it, I'm a smartphone addict. I've tried, as best I can, to avoid using the big adtech social media platforms in the last few years. But even a web browser is enough to suck me in several times a day for hours in total.

A while back, I bought a dumbphone - a Nokia 2780 Flip, to be exact. It's essentially a modern version of the flip phones many of us had back in the early 2000s. You get calls, texts, contacts, calendars, some very basic web browsing, and not much else. It runs on KaiOS, which is a mostly proprietary derivative of Firefox OS from years back, with the UI redesigned for flip phones.

It doesn't have a Matrix app (despite the efforts of enthusiastic hackers) so I'd be missing out on what I've been using as my primary messaging platform for a while. I think I could probably get by with that, only having SMS, phone calls, and email while on the go. But what has me dreading the possible switch is actually something else entirely.

Robocalls and spam callers have become an increasingly annoying problem lately, and simultaneously, smartphone platforms have actually gotten pretty good at blocking them. I personally use SpamBlocker because it's FOSS and very configurable, but Google and Apple now both have call screening features for those who want to go that route. It feels like a bit of an arms race between spammers and smartphone vendors.

KaiOS doesn't have anything like this. I'd be subject to the flood of spam calls that I've been somewhat successful at avoiding thus far. So it feels like there's a tradeoff here: do I switch, and deal with the annoyance of multiple daily spam calls? Or do I stick with a smartphone, and continue to get sucked into the anxiety rectangle? I wish there was a better choice!

Terracrypt

Dumbphones and the spam filtering tradeoff