Safi – A growing number of young people are looking at the smartphone in their hand and deciding they want less of it. Across the world, Gen Z is trading the endless scroll for a flip phone that does little more than call and text.
Part of the appeal is pure fashion. The Y2K revival has turned the little clamshell into an accessory again, and closing one with a snap ends a conversation in a way no touchscreen can.
But the deeper pull is the feeling of getting your attention back. A 2024 Harris Poll survey of American Gen Z adults found that 60 percent spend at least four hours a day on social media, and about half wished TikTok and X had never been invented.
Only about a fifth said the same of the smartphone itself. The exhaustion is with the feed, not the device.
That is why stepping away reads as luxury rather than sacrifice. In a world that rewards being always online, being hard to reach is becoming its own kind of status, and pulling out a flip phone at dinner has turned into a quiet badge of self-control.
The lifestyle that comes with it is deliberately smaller. Owners sit through a coffee or a class without reaching for a screen. They memorize a route instead of following the blue dot, and the group chat waits until they are home.
The sales figures say this is more than a pose. HMD, the company behind today’s Nokia phones, reported double-digit growth in feature phone sales for a second straight year in 2024, with flip phone sales alone doubling in a single fiscal year.
The company ties the revival to people trying to fight digital fatigue, and sees it across all age groups, with Gen Z leading the turn toward what it calls functional yet fashionable alternatives to the smartphone.
In the United States, Counterpoint Research forecast feature phone sales of 2.8 million in 2023, a comeback the firm linked to the same digital detox mood. That was barely 2 percent of American handset sales, but growth of any kind counts in a market where basic phones were supposed to be extinct.
The phones themselves are getting prettier and cleverer. Alongside reissued classics sit “smart dumbphones” like the Minimal Phone, which pairs an easy-on-the-eyes e-paper screen and a physical keyboard with a pared-back set of tools.
Not everyone goes all the way. Many keep their smartphone but tame it, deleting apps or switching the screen to grayscale until it bores them.
Which raises the question closer to home. Morocco’s Gen Z is as attached to its screens as any, living much of daily life through WhatsApp and Instagram.
Whether the urge to switch off reaches Morocco, or whether the smartphone stays too woven into how Moroccans work, bank, and socialize, remains an open question.
The generation that grew up online may yet become the first to log off on purpose.
