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Short summary of feature phone market in 2025

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  • B

    I've been researching dumbphones lately and wanted to share about the developments I've learned. I'll be writing from an European perspective.
    I am omitting Android since I wasn't interested in it. Android Go is discontinued, if you care.

    CloudFone

    This is an addon to the barebones OS manufacturers add to their phones. Such OS' are e.g. HMD (formely Nokia) S30+ or other Mocor RTOS based systtems.
    This addon is an "app" within the OS that's a browser which offloads the rendering to another server. It works similar to the Puffin browser.

    The advantage here is that the underlying browser engine is ran and updated on the server.
    This helps avoid the KaiOS situation: KaiOS v2 (the last version in Europe) uses Firefox 48 (current version is 137).
    CloudFone could be running the latest stable Chromium even on an old device, as long as the rendering server is updated to that version. The remote server rendering is obviously more powerful than what the little feature phone can normally do.

    You can see how it works here: https://youtu.be/coaLnA7Twl4?t=295

    The disadvantage here is that those apps do not work offline - you need to connect to the server over the Internet to render them.
    If the underyling rendering server is ever shut down, you lose all your apps and your phone is back to being a dumb-dumbphone.
    It seems like you don't have control over what apps are available and which are not. These could be rug-pulled at any moment. There are some rumors on /r/dumbphones about a WhatsApp CloudFone app which would be big.
    Some of the apps are something you wouldn't want on a dumbphone, like tiktok or yt shorts.

    The trick is that the firmware versions with CloudFone enabled are only offered to phones in India. The only way to get these firmware versions is to download a custom firmware from the Russian 4pda.to forums.
    This custom firmware seems to be available for Nokia 3210 4G 2024 or Nokia 220 4G. A more powerful option would be HMD 110 4G 2024 since it has 128 MB RAM, but I couldn't find the CloudFone enabled firmware for it.

    I get that this approach is not acceptable to the freedom-oriented, tech-savvy demographic on Lemmy, but it looks like this is where the mainstreaim is heading right now.

    The downside of the non-KaiOS devices is that they normally don't support WiFi and thus can't serve as a mobile hotspot. There are devices like itel R60+ which can, however, but I have no idea which website to import it from.

    KaiOS

    The latest KaiOS version on devices sold in Europe is KaiOS v2.5.x. The latest available outside Europe is 3.1 (?). There's supposedly KaiOS v4 in the works. People say it's dead.

    KaiOS is just not an European thing - this is balantly obvious if you look at HMD's "Barbie phone" - it uses KaiOS 3.1 in the US version, but in Europe, it uses the basic HMD S30+ OS.

    There's a KaiOS jailbreaking community. See https://wiki.bananahackers.net/en/devices for supported devices. Apps you can install with the jailbreak are here: https://store.bananahackers.net/.
    I've seen an XMPP client and a Matrix one too.

    I've been only considering devices with a USB-C port and available in Europe and what I've found is Blackview N1000 (somewhat easily available on Allegro in Poland, has USB-C and is jailbreakable according to bananahackers wiki, but it supposedly resets itself on long +20m phone calls), Gigaset GL7 (USB-C, unknown if jailbreakable, available only if you buy secondhand from someone), myPhone UP smart LTE (USB-C, non jailbreakable), Maxcom MK281 (microusb, not known if jailbreakable, can buy secondhand only). Note that some of those aren't jailbreakable according to the bananahackers table above.

    You could also import an US KaiOS v3/v4 (TCL Flip 4 is KaiOS v4, US only) phone, but the overlap in LTE bands is only on band 7 (I think?), meaning it'd only have reception in cities. There's someone that imported an US Nokia 2780 and reports it works in Italy on /r/dumbphones.

    KaiOS devices mostly can serve as a mobile hotspot, which is nice.

    postmarketOS

    Phones that run KaiOS out of the factory normally have 0.5 GB of RAM, meaning they can boot Linux. See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Feature_Phone
    The newest device in this table is the NA Nokia 2780 released in 2022. The feature support tables seems not to support calls.

    SoCs

    The "Feature phone SoCs" section seems to be gone from the Unisoc website. The Wikipedia SoC Unisoc table lists e.g. T107 but doesn't list the newer T127 or T157 (supports 5G and only ever used on Asian feature phones)

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  • P

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    G
    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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