My obsession with flip phones and the quest to find the perfect dumbphone

Ever since I was a kid, I never really used social media all that much, I never used cloud services, and I always disabled most things on my phones because I always had very shitty phones, and disabling stuff was the only way to make them work properly, this led me to learn ADB at a young age and made me fall in love - and subsequentially hate - with custom roms and all that jazz, it was fun honestly :3

anyway, point is, I always used my phone as a "dumb" phone for most of my life, never going past like 10 apps at best, whatsapp/telegram, a web browser, a password manager, that's it.

BUT, I've been feeling overwhelmed by life recently, I've started to burnout more easily and I'm doomscrolling a looot more,

So for the past few years I've been trying to find a "dumbphone" that I could replace my phone with, to simplify my life in some ways, the main requirements are fairly simple:

- must work in europe

- must have android (and possibly ADB/root capabilities)

- must be 4g or 5g (3g is dead where I live)

- must work with whatsapp (which means android 5 or higher)*


*if I could somehow convince all of my friends to move to XMPP or telegram, this requirement would disappear, and you'll see why this requirement specifically bothers me so much

Last year I bought a blackberry q10, under the impression that I could run a custom whatsapp client for android 4 on it, but that client doesn't fucking work for some reason,

I love the qwerty keyboard, and if it wasn't for whatsapp (or for the horrible thermals) i'd have switched to it a long time ago.

And so, we're back to the drawing board, my nex favorite design is the flip-phone design, so now my new priority is a cheap flip phone,

the cheapest (40€) I could find is an italian flip phone named "Brondi"

the phone looks really shitty, having only half a gig of ram, but it should be usable for most stuff, also it's either that or phones that cost like five times the ammount of money that this does, so I can't really choose anything else.