I'm not the sort of person to feel any pressure from the 'everyone else is doing it/has it' line of thought but I find my daughter having a smartphone has been really good for us as a family. She got one the last term in Year 6 and it has made her much more sociable. I'm normally quite law abiding but I did let her have WhatsApp at age 11 as it worked for us as a family: she could join a group chat with her older siblings, cousins and grandmother, and the things the young ones post on there justify it for me alone.
She also now has Snapchat- I did make her wait for that I think, and due to a complete lack of issues with that, she has TikTok now. I was braced for there to be problems but so far, so good.
She has different groups of friends that orchestrate their plans through Snapchat mainly and she is off cycling with them regularly. If she only had text messaging this would not be available to her. I know adults say she could just send texts to the group but this doesn't seem to be realistic, and she would just miss out, which I think would be to her detriment.
She is really busy with extra curricular stuff and I am actually quite grateful that sometimes she will relax with her phone for half an hour. Her Duolingo streak is impressive.
I had many delicate conversations with her about my concerns about what she might be exposed to when she wanted Snapchat and when I finally confessed I was worried about cyber bullying or exposure to suicide death cults, she laughed politely and showed me what she had been looking at which was quite random to me but very wholesome.
I also love us all being able to track each other. Not sure I could give up Find My Phone now. I can see she's got safely to her destination which stops me from feeling I need to check she's okay. She tracks me too so she can see if I am en route home and she shares Spotify playlists with me, which is nice. For us, smart phones have fostered greater connection between family, and between her and new friends.
I know some people will feel I am terribly naive but if I am honest, my biggest worry is her mental health and social isolation, and if being inundated with snaps of her friends rabbits (I kid you not, I think that's half of what she receives some days) I think we're doing ok.
I don't want her school to ban them. They have to be off and in her bag during lessons unless they are told otherwise, but it has occasionally been useful to be able to send a message for her to read at the end of the day, in both directions. She is much more independent and responsible for running her own life as a result of having smart phone access and that is also important to me as a parent.
A relative of mine doesn't allow her children to have social media and her daughter and mine have fallen out of touch entirely as a consequence whereas another very distant relative allows it, and she was delighted to get a message from a distant cousin from the other side of the world on her birthday.
I'd rather she had a go at navigating online life while I've still got her ear. Starting using a smart phone at 16 would be less advantageous in my opinion: she'd be less likely to discuss any of it with me and she would have lost all those kitchen table discussions we have about social media. It might be a different conversation at 16, or none.
I'm not disagreeing with anyone who doesn't want their child to have a smartphone at all and I very much take on board the potential pitfalls but, like everything, there are good and bad aspects of smart phones. I don't miss having to arrange social things with other parents either. That was both time consuming and frustrating on occasion. I think I would find it hard to go back to her not being able to do all that for herself.
Good luck, OP. These things are v hard to navigate, like parenting generally. You only know if you made the right decision years later.