Time and time once more, house owners of dumb telephones—or minimalist telephones—flip to their area of interest communities asking for added options for his or her pared-down units: an authenticator app, Uber, or a technique to view mountaineering trails. They became to those telephones to cut back the time spent looking at a smartphone display and lower the nervousness pushed through the fashionable consideration economic system from their lives, however seems we nonetheless want apps.
“I can’t inform you what number of people come again to us announcing that, ‘Whats up, if most effective you had this factor for QR code scanning; if most effective you had this localized app,’ that they would have the ability to use the Mild Telephone extra steadily,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Mild Telephone, tells WIRED. “We are a smaller staff, we are not Apple. We would not have app shops with hundreds of thousands of apps.”
However now the Brooklyn corporate is taking a step to near that hole. Mild Telephone is launching a developer program in Might for LightOS, the running device powering its new Mild Telephone III. Now someone within the platform can extra simply create “Gear” they need to use at the telephone.
Courtesy of Mild Telephone
Mild Telephone is among the extra outstanding corporations within the area of interest minimum telephone marketplace, which noticed many new avid gamers in 2025, just like the Minimum Telephone or the Mudita Kompakt. Mild has been making its utility-focused units since 2014 for individuals who really feel overly reliant on generation. The primary Mild Telephone may just most effective make and obtain telephone calls, and the second one added perks like turn-by-turn instructions. The most recent iteration, the Mild Telephone III, very much modernized the {hardware} whilst staying true to its bare-bones nature.
However for the individuals who nonetheless need their elementary dumb telephone to try this one little further factor, the power so as to add Gear is excellent news.
The Mild Telephone neighborhood has already been modding and hacking the corporate’s {hardware}. Whilst Mild most effective gives a handful of first-party Gear, reminiscent of a Calculator, Alarm, Calendar, and Podcasts, neighborhood individuals have made their very own, together with a Spotify consumer, an app to retailer passes—like gymnasium club playing cards—or even an app to test bus and educate schedules.
Now, with an reliable device developer equipment, it’s going to be a lot more uncomplicated for events to make the apps they would like. You do not even want a Mild Telephone III to create a Instrument for the platform, despite the fact that those third-party Gear are most effective to be had on the most recent handset, no longer older Mild Telephone fashions.
