Time and time again, owners of dumb phones—or minimalist phones—turn to their niche communities asking for extra features for their pared-down devices: an authenticator app, Uber, or a way to view hiking trails. They turned to these phones to reduce the time spent staring at a smartphone screen and cut the anxiety driven by the modern attention economy from their lives, but turns out we still need apps.
“I cannot tell you how many people come back to us saying that, ‘Hey, if only you had this thing for QR code scanning; if only you had this localized app,’ that they’d be able to use the Light Phone more often,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Light Phone, tells WIRED. “We’re a smaller team, we’re not Apple. We don’t have app stores with millions of apps.”
But now the Brooklyn company is taking a step to close that gap. Light Phone is launching a developer program in May for LightOS, the operating system powering its new Light Phone III. Now anyone interested in the platform can more easily create “Tools” they want to use on the phone.
Courtesy of Light Phone
Light Phone is one of the more prominent companies in the niche minimal phone market, which saw many new players in 2025, like the Minimal Phone or the Mudita Kompakt. Light has been making its utility-focused devices since 2014 for people who feel overly reliant on technology. The first Light Phone could only make and receive phone calls, and the second added perks like turn-by-turn directions. The latest iteration, the Light Phone III, greatly modernized the hardware while staying true to its bare-bones nature.
But for the people who still want their basic dumb phone to do that one little extra thing, the ability to add Tools is good news.
The Light Phone community has already been modding and hacking the company’s hardware. While Light only offers a handful of first-party Tools, such as a Calculator, Alarm, Calendar, and Podcasts, community members have made their own, including a Spotify client, an app to store passes—like gym membership cards—and even an app to check bus and train schedules.
Now, with an official software developer kit, it will be much easier for interested parties to make the apps they want. You don’t even need a Light Phone III to create a Tool for the platform, though these third-party Tools are only available on the latest handset, not older Light Phone models.
