// notes from the flip side
The Journey
One dad, two kids, no smartphones, and a slow-burn hobby project to make a dumb phone livable. Field notes below.
The Commodore Callback and the great flip-phone revival
Commodore is bringing back the flip phone — a de-Googled, social-media-blocking, SID-ringtone-singing Callback 8020 — and the excitement around it says something bigger about where we're all quietly headed: back to classic flip.
Why I built dumbsms in Rust and iced, not Swift
I'm on a Mac, so Swift was the obvious choice. I picked Rust and iced instead — because the people who carry a flip phone are just as likely to be on Windows or Linux, and I wanted one small, fast, native app instead of a browser in a trench coat.
Before dumbsms, I tried DIGITS
When I went flip-phone-first on T-Mobile, DIGITS looked like the perfect fit: read and send my texts from a real keyboard. It didn't quite get there for me — but trying it taught me exactly what I wanted, and that turned into dumbsms.
The one app this phone will install
The TCL Flip Go lets you install exactly one app — and only if you know its secret name. A deep dive into the OEM sideload gate I found by decompiling the phone's own PackageManager, and the disguise dumbsms wears to slip through it.
Is this thing even Android?
Before dumbsms could talk to my flip phone, I had to win an argument with it about what operating system it was running. A field log of KaiOS dead ends, a secret soft-key handshake, and the moment ADB finally said 'device'.
I used to be an engineer. The robots wrote this one.
dumbsms is nearly 100% AI-developed. I'm tech-savvy enough to know what I'm looking at — and that's exactly why this experiment is interesting.
The one thing I missed was typing
I could live without the apps, the feed, and the camera. What I couldn't live with was T9 for work texts. So I built dumbsms.
Why I traded my iPhone for a flip phone
A one-year-old reaching for my phone was all the warning I needed. In December 2024 I downgraded an iPhone 13 Mini to a 1990s-style flip. Here's why.