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 units: an authenticator app, Uber, or a strategy to view mountain climbing trails. They turned to those telephones to scale back the time spent gazing a smartphone display and minimize the anxiousness pushed by the fashionable consideration financial system from their lives, however seems we nonetheless want apps.
“I can not 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 of use the Mild Telephone extra usually,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Mild Telephone, tells WIRED. “We’re a smaller workforce, we’re not Apple. We do not have app shops with tens of millions of apps.”
However now the Brooklyn firm is taking a step to shut that hole. Mild Telephone is launching a developer program in Could for LightOS, the working system powering its new Mild Telephone III. Now anybody within the platform can extra simply create “Instruments” they need to use on the telephone.
Courtesy of Mild Telephone
Mild Telephone is among the extra distinguished corporations within the area of interest minimal telephone market, which noticed many new gamers in 2025, just like the Minimal Telephone or the Mudita Kompakt. Mild has been making its utility-focused units since 2014 for individuals who really feel overly reliant on expertise. The primary Mild Telephone may solely make and obtain telephone calls, and the second added perks like turn-by-turn instructions. The most recent iteration, the Mild Telephone III, enormously modernized the {hardware} whereas staying true to its bare-bones nature.
However for the individuals who nonetheless need their fundamental dumb telephone to try this one little additional factor, the flexibility so as to add Instruments is nice information.
The Mild Telephone group has already been modding and hacking the corporate’s {hardware}. Whereas Mild solely gives a handful of first-party Instruments, comparable to a Calculator, Alarm, Calendar, and Podcasts, group 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 verify 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 Mild Telephone III to create a Instrument for the platform, although these third-party Instruments are solely obtainable on the newest handset, not older Mild Telephone fashions.
