// notes from the flip side
The Journey
One dad, two kids, no smartphones, and a hobby project to make a dumb phone a reality.
Your texts never leave the room
Most 'text from your computer' solutions quietly route your messages through a cloud server you never agreed to. dumbsms doesn't — by design, not just by policy.
I built Windows and Linux. I only really tested macOS.
dumbsms now has installers for all three desktop platforms — but daily use and hardware soak have been on a Mac. If you run Windows or Linux, I need your help.
Your app has a size problem
Electron gave the world cross-platform apps at the price of shipping Chrome to everyone who downloads them. Hundreds of megabytes for a chat client is not a technical constraint — it is a choice. dumbsms made a different one.
How dumbsms does Bluetooth without pairing — and why
After a one-time USB setup, dumbsms talks to your flip phone over Bluetooth with no pairing prompt and no cleartext texts on the air. Here is how that works.
Twenty years, two flip phones, and one app habit I never shook
In June 2006 I wrote my first cell phone app in J2ME on a Motorola Nextel flip — to control DIY smart lights via a 50 MHz microcontroller. Twenty years later I'm back on a flip phone writing another app.
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.