Light Phone Is Making Its Dumb Phone More Useful With Third-Party ‘Tools’

Time and time again, owners of dumb phones—or minimalist phones—turn to their niche communities asking for other features for their pared-down devices: an authenticator app, Uber, oregon a mode to presumption hiking trails. They turned to these phones to trim the clip spent staring astatine a smartphone surface and chopped the anxiousness driven by the modern attraction economy from their lives, but turns retired we still request apps.

“I cannot archer you however galore radical travel backmost to america saying that, ‘Hey, if lone you had this happening for QR codification scanning; if lone you had this localized app,’ that they'd beryllium capable to usage the Light Phone much often," Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Light Phone, tells WIRED. “We're a smaller team, we're not Apple. We don't person app stores with millions of apps.”

But present the Brooklyn institution is taking a measurement to adjacent that gap. Light Phone is launching a developer program successful May for LightOS, the operating strategy powering its caller Light Phone III. Now anyone funny successful the level tin much easy make “Tools” they privation to usage connected the phone.

Light Phone is 1 of the much salient companies successful the niche minimal telephone market, which saw galore caller players successful 2025, similar the Minimal Phone oregon the Mudita Kompakt. Light has been making its utility-focused devices since 2014 for radical who consciousness overly reliant connected technology. The archetypal Light Phone could lone marque and person telephone calls, and the 2nd added perks similar turn-by-turn directions. The latest iteration, the Light Phone III, greatly modernized the hardware portion staying existent to its bare-bones nature.

But for the radical who still privation their basal dumb telephone to bash that 1 small other thing, the quality to adhd Tools is bully news.

The Light Phone assemblage has already been modding and hacking the company's hardware. While Light lone offers a fistful of first-party Tools, specified arsenic a Calculator, Alarm, Calendar, and Podcasts, community members person made their own, including a Spotify client, an app to store passes—like gym rank cards—and adjacent an app to cheque autobus and bid schedules.

Now, with an authoritative bundle developer kit, it volition beryllium overmuch easier for funny parties to marque the apps they want. You don't adjacent request a Light Phone III to make a Tool for the platform, though these third-party Tools are only disposable connected the latest handset, not older Light Phone models.