TCL Flip Pro, can I deactivate data on it? (Prepaid)
Shalom1
Newbie

I'm looking for a basic flip phone for my 12-year-old daughter, that just does talk text and pictures.

I got a TCL Flip Pro at Mal Wart for about forty bux, activated it on VZW Prepay for another 35. Problem is, while it looks like a basic flip, it's basically a smartphone with a hinge in it. I don't want Google Search and all the other stuff in there.

There's a group called TAG that dikes out all that stuff from basic phones, but they haven't got anything that works on TCL's OS. My wife's LG Exalt VN220 was a candidate for this (she wanted it that way) but that phone is like $350 nowadays which is pretty insane for the feature set on that device.

I think the basic problem is that with the shutdown of the voice network, all voice calls move as packets on the data network (VoLTE), which is also why the basic phones are so rare and expensive these days; basically you need all the computing hardware of a smartphone, so a VZW-compatible basic phone is essentially a smartphone that's been neutered.

So: two questions. Is there any way to remove the various apps and leave just the voice and text, or, is there any trickery I can play with maybe changing DNS to make web browsing either unavailable altogether, or alternatively go through some kind of filtering company by using their DNS.

Thanks in advance.

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