BREAKINGVIEWS-Brick phones will ring in an unlikely revival

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Jennifer Johnson

LONDON, Dec 19 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Smartphone makers will soon face an unlikely competitor. Concerns about the impact of social media are driving demand for old-school Nokia brick-like handsets, now known as feature phones. If Apple AAPL.O and Samsung don’t find a way of selling safer versions, they may lose out.

Nokia NOKIA.HE was once the world’s leading mobile phone maker, with a market share approaching 40% in 2007. But its domination withered away when it failed to produce a hit smartphone of its own. Nowadays, the Finnish company is a provider of telecoms network equipment, like routers and antennae. In 2016, it flogged the rights to make Nokia-branded devices to HMD Global, which now stands to reap the rewards of an unlikely revival.

Kids aren’t necessarily taken with the vintage charm of simpler phones. But their caregivers increasingly recognise they’re less addictive than newer models loaded with social media apps. In a poll of U.S. parents from 2023, 67% said that overuse of devices was their top health concern for their children.

Sales data shows the trend of buying dumb phones is gaining ground. According to consultancy CCS Insight, some 450,000 of these devices were sold in the UK in 2024 – up from 400,000 in the prior year. Meanwhile, sales in western Europe are up 4% on 2023 for a total of 215 million units.

But those figures are likely to increase as worries about online safety grow more prominent. According to researchers from the London School of Economics, one in seven countries has recently introduced policies to limit or prevent pupil access to smartphones at school, with many more considering similar action. Australia’s government recently passed a law stipulating that social media users must be over 16 years of age. In October, 33 U.S. states filed a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta META.O, accusing it of fuelling a mental health crisis in young people.

This poses a more long-term challenge to groups like Samsung and Apple – with the latter making more than half its annual revenue from iPhones. Competition from rivals like China’s Xiaomi is slowing sales growth. If a new cohort of phone users is wary of their product’s impact on their mental health, they may not ever buy one.

These phone giants have a choice. They can defend the benefits of their products and deny their purported negative effects, or they can pivot and create age-appropriate smart devices. There are already numerous parental control apps on the market promising to keep kids safe online, but configuring and monitoring them takes work. For now, without a more straightforward alternative, the brick phones of the past are set to stage a comeback.

Follow @jenjohn_ on X

This is a Reuters Breakingviews prediction for 2025. To read more of our predictions, click here.

(Editing by Aimee Donnellan and Oliver Taslic)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on JOHNSON/Jennifer.Johnson@thomsonreuters.com))