Time and time once more, house owners of dumb telephones—or minimalist telephones—flip to their area of interest communities asking for additional options for his or her pared-down gadgets: an authenticator app, Uber, or a approach to view mountain climbing trails. They turned to those telephones to cut back the time spent observing a smartphone display screen and reduce the anxiousness pushed by the trendy consideration financial system from their lives, however seems we nonetheless want apps.
“I can’t let you know how many individuals come again to us saying that, ‘Hey, if solely you had this factor for QR code scanning; if solely you had this localized app,’ that they’d be capable to use the Gentle Telephone extra typically,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Gentle Telephone, tells WIRED. “We’re a smaller workforce, we’re not Apple. We do not have app shops with hundreds of thousands of apps.”
However now the Brooklyn firm is taking a step to shut that hole. Gentle Telephone is launching a developer program in Might for LightOS, the working system powering its new Gentle Telephone III. Now anybody within the platform can extra simply create “Instruments” they need to use on the cellphone.
Courtesy of Gentle Telephone
Gentle Telephone is likely one of the extra outstanding firms within the area of interest minimal cellphone market, which noticed many new gamers in 2025, just like the Minimal Telephone or the Mudita Kompakt. Gentle has been making its utility-focused gadgets since 2014 for individuals who really feel overly reliant on know-how. The primary Gentle Telephone may solely make and obtain cellphone calls, and the second added perks like turn-by-turn instructions. The newest iteration, the Gentle Telephone III, tremendously modernized the {hardware} whereas staying true to its bare-bones nature.
However for the individuals who nonetheless need their primary dumb cellphone to try this one little additional factor, the flexibility so as to add Instruments is nice information.
The Gentle Telephone neighborhood has already been modding and hacking the corporate’s {hardware}. Whereas Gentle solely affords a handful of first-party Instruments, akin to a Calculator, Alarm, Calendar, and Podcasts, neighborhood members have made their very own, together with a Spotify consumer, an app to retailer passes—like health club membership playing cards—and even an app to examine bus and practice schedules.
Now, with an official software program developer equipment, it will likely be a lot simpler for events to make the apps they need. You do not even want a Gentle Telephone III to create a Software for the platform, although these third-party Instruments are solely obtainable on the newest handset, not older Gentle Telephone fashions.
