Your Ultimate Resource Guide for Exploring the Light Phone

TIL: The Light Phone is Awesome.

I’m not going to dive into all of the “whys” and reasons to get a Light Phone—I’m sure you already understand…and maybe want to light your smartphone on fire by now.

In this post, I’m going to highlight some of my favorite websites, videos, podcasts, and things I’ve learned in my extensive research about the Light Phone so far.

Why I personally decided to unplug and get a Light Phone:

1. I was spending WAY too much time on my smartphone
2. My smartphone was distracting me from work, conversations, daily life, etc.
3. My smartphone was causing me to do nothing but CONSUME during every waking moment. I didn’t have the mental capacity to be creative or decide what I even wanted to be doing, I would just get sucked into my phone for hours.
4. The Light Phone is way easier on the eyes. I have an astigmatism so lighting is already rough for me, and I spend all day on my computer already
5. The Light Phone also gives me a wonderful sense of nostalgia—a reminder of the golden days of carrying around my favorite childhood devices with greyscale screens: the iPod Mini, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance. It also low key gives off Zune vibes.

My Light Phone pain points:

1. TICKETS! This is my biggest qualm at the moment. I go to a lot of concerts and events, use public transportation, and fly a lot. You need a digital scannable ticket or QR code for all of these things. I’m thinking I’ll have to carry around my iPhone for these purposes and trying to download what I need ahead of time, or using the Light phone as a hotspot to pull up the tickets.
2. Ride sharing. Uber, Lyft, Lime, or other ride share or bike and scooter rental programs. As a female, to me this is more of a safety thing and peace of mind to know I can use it if needed. I’m currently selling my car and will be relying on ride share, public transportation, and good ole fashioned walking. I did find out that Uber has a phone number you can call: 1-833-USE-UBER to request a ride, but it is only available from 4am-10pm ET.
3. Directions. For the same reasons listed above, having reliable directions is a big deal to me. From what I’ve read, the Directions feature on the Light Phone is spotty. Hopefully they will be providing updates for this soon.
4. Music. The Light Phone has the capability to download .mp3’s to it, but not much storage space, and that’s kind of tedious. I’ve heard they’ve been in talks with Spotify, but seems far off in the future. Maybe it’s time for Limewire to make a comeback?
5. Camera. I take a LOT of photos. I can certainly cut down on that, and be more intentional using my GoPro. It’s just one more thing to carry around, but I’ll have a lot higher quality photos/videos and be able to turn it into content more easily.
6. Two Factor Authentication (2FA). I never thought too much about how heavily my phone is connected to pretty much every digital account I have…Gmail, Paypal, Venmo, Authy, etc. All of which require you to either do something specific on your phone or receive a text code. This is going to be fun to sort out.
7. Other apps. There is an app for every damn thing these days. As I’m waiting for my Light Phone to show up, I’m taking some prep measures and moving things over to either my iPad (which I don’t plan to carry around with me), or my desktop browser. As an example, these are some of the apps I’m having to move over that I actually use on a regular basis:

• Wyze — for viewing my security cameras
• Resident Portal, Nexus, and Luxer One — apps that my apartment building uses for getting packages, door access, reserving spaces, booking gym classes, paying rent, requesting maintenance, etc.
• GoPro Quik — this is how I easily save, edit, and share photos and videos from my GoPro (which I will be using a lot more now!)
• WhatsApp — I use Whatsapp to communicate with my non-American friends. Luckily, they have a pretty decent browser version. After I move to Europe next year, I’m going to have to figure out a better solution…but that’s a 2024 Rachel problem.
• OBDFusion — I use this app with an OBD reader in my car to check engine codes.
• Audible & Libby — Audiobooks are technically able to be downloaded to the Light Phone as .mp3’s, but it’s kind of hacky from what I understand and I haven’t gotten to experiment with that yet. If you want to try for yourself: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libby-download
• Notion — my favorite app of all time. I use this to organize every aspect of my life. I’ll be using it on my computer and iPad from now on.
• Duolingo — I’m currently learning Italian, which I’ll have to experiment with using on the iPad at home
• Volo — this is the app we use in Denver for playing group sports, so it’s definitely going to be a challenge to only access this at home. I won’t be able to see team messages, know if games are cancelled, or be able to check-in at the game with my QR code.
• Spotify — I use Spotify religiously for all my music and podcasts. Really hoping Light Phone adopts this some day, but for now I’ll just be using it at home.
• Other socials: Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit — again, only using while at home, and a lot less…which I think will be glorious.

Here are a few of my favorite videos that helped me make the decision to buy the Light Phone:

Additional links:

If you want to research more about the Light Phone, I highly recommend checking out the following resources. There are a ton of hidden gems of information here…

• The Light Phone’s FAQ’s: https://www.thelightphone.com/faq
• The Light Phone’s Support: https://support.thelightphone.com/hc/en-us
• The Light Phone’s Blog and News: https://medium.com/the-light-phone
• @thelightphone: https://www.instagram.com/thelightphone
• Reddit r/lightphone: https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPhone

and listen to this podcast from the founders of the Light Phone:

So what do you think—are you ready to take the plunge?!

*All of the photos in this post have been borrowed from thelightphone.com