The Light Phone Has a Growth Problem

Meta knows I'm addicted to my smartphone. While I'm swiping through Instagram stories it nestles in ads for Boox, Ratta, Minimal Phone, and pretty much every rabbit hole I've gone down looking for ways to curb my usage habits. The one company I didn't come across was Light. While they do have social media accounts they don't use the tools of the attention economy to sell me a cure. They employ something called tangible branding. Meaning they walk the walk. If something is in opposition to their values as a company or is implicit in their offering(s), they don't compromise when it's convenient. It's one of the reasons I enthusiastically support them. They also do things like offer a carbon offset. They don't support planned obsolescence product models - having only three generations of phones across 10 years. And two of those three phones are in active support. They've also been critical about companies like Google and Meta, they have an accessible/easy to read privacy statement, and once you buy in they don't keep trying to up-sell you or bombard you with ads and offers. In fact I didn't know they offered a cell plan until months after I got one of their phones.

I don't even mind the price. I bought my Light Phone II second hand for $190 from the aftermarket sales thread on their subreddit. But I would even argue that the full price of $299 isn't so bad when you consider how seldom they come out with a phone means the phones hold their value, you can spread the price over 5-10 years, and they only improve over time. They add new features and continue support without drop in performance. The Light Phone III even has a user-replaceable battery and screen. When you examine the full list of values they use as disciplines it feels like the proverbial Marin Luther nailing his list of grievances on the door of the church of Big Tech. It's something I don't see in Light's competitors. I chose them because I want to believe that this isn't just a startup in their "don't be evil" era. I've grown tired of supporting companies that have contempt for their customers and know we will buy from them because we don't have a choice. My iPhone isn't fully replaced but at least now it sits in a drawer and only comes out when I need it. Light's motto is that it's meant to be used as little as possible. I would revise that and say it's meant to be used on purpose. I hope Light only grows as much as it needs to sustain itself and it doesn't veer away from these values. But I do have one gripe and they yet to have a good answer to this.

For all my humbugging about Apple and Google they at least have one dialogue with their audience that Light does not have with theirs. They have an app store. Light does not. Despite all their admirable values Light OS is just as much of a walled garden as iOS. It's not anti-corporate, it's counter-corporate. Light is beyond intentional; it's curatorial. In the fine art sense of the word. The design of the hardware and Light OS is very refined. The pace at which they roll out new apps or "tools" as they are called, is also very thoughtful and usually refined - save for bugs that usually get ironed out in due time. While I think anyone submitting most anything to the "toolbox" will most likely dilute the brand, I think there's an opportunity to reexamine this kind of ecosystem. The Light Phone is not a dumb phone, it's almost like a conceptual fork of the smartphone. Roll back to 2007 and split the path in two. One path has the timeline of smartphones as we know it with all its miracles and consequences. The other is the Light Phone. Each new development is an answer to another question we have about the "prime" path. Yes to maps but no to massive data harvesting. Yes to podcasts but no to endless video scrolling. Yes to camera but no to instant preoccupation with publishing content. The list goes on.

I really hope somewhere in that closet-sized office with 12ish employees they are seeing this question and recognizing there has to be answer here. Maybe it means taking a page from the way certain linux distros curate their flathub. Maybe it's embracing a bug bounty program so the Light team itself can focus on the other tools that are frequently requested. If you pour through old reddit posts you'll see many instances where the dev community has offered to step up and help. There's even now an unofficial modding subreddit specifically for the Light Phone III. Whether or not Light wants to address this aspect, it's getting addressed. I'm holding patience for the fact that they probably really want to find a good answer. They've recognized as much in livestreams before. There's a deeper moral question there too since Light OS is built and benefits from from open source technology. Conceptually it feels like something about the open source community may hold the key to how they address this even if it doesn't mean a code dump on github.

Like a small business, Light's prices are little higher, the selection is lower, and they take a little longer but dammit they're here for their customers. Their co-founder has even directly replied to me over email for simple customer service issues. And in all other respects Light fits the description of a community-first small business. But I think until they figure this out, they are always going to have a growth problem. Maybe even a sustainability one.