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

time and time Again, owners of nerd phones – or minimalist phones – turn to their niche communities and demand additional features for their lesser devices: an authenticator app, Uber, or a way to look up hiking trails. They turned to these phones to reduce the time spent staring at smartphone screens and eliminate the anxiety induced by the modern attention economy from their lives, but discovered that we still need apps.

“I can’t tell you how many people come back to us saying, ‘Hey, I wish you had this thing for QR code scanning; if you only had this localized app,’ that they would be able to use the Lite Phone more often,” Caiwei Tang, CEO and co-founder of the Lite Phone, told WIRED. “We’re a small team, we’re not Apple. We don’t have an app store with millions of apps.”

But now a Brooklyn company is taking a step toward closing that gap. Lite Phone is launching a developer program in May for LiteOS, the operating system that powers its new Lite Phone III. Now anyone interested in the platform can more easily create “tools” they want to use on the phone.

Courtesy of Lite Phone

Lite Phones is one of the more prominent companies in the niche minimalist phone market, which saw many new players in 2025 such as Minimal Phones or Mudita Compact. Lite has been creating utility-focused devices since 2014 for people who feel overly dependent on technology. The first Lite phone could only make and receive phone calls, and the second added features such as turn-by-turn directions. The latest iteration, the Lite Phone III, significantly modernized the hardware while remaining true to its original nature.

But for those who still Want their basic nerd phone to do a little extra, the ability to add tools is good news.

The Lite phone community is already modifying and hacking the company’s hardware. While Lite only offers a handful of first-party tools, such as a calculator, alarm, calendar, and podcasts, community members have created their own tools, including a Spotify client, an app for storing passes — like gym membership cards — and even an app for checking bus and train schedules.

Now, with an official software developer kit, it will be much easier for interested parties to create the apps they want. You don’t even need a Lite Phone III to have tools for the platform, although these are third-party tools Only Available on the latest handsets, not older Lite phone models.