Six Month Update

October 2025

Note from Joe and Kai:

There are no real words to describe how grateful we are for everyone that helped us launch the Light Phone III and contributed with a pre-order since June 2024. This phone excites us so much and it truly wouldn’t have been possible without your support and patience. Today there are thousands of Light Phone III users in the world, leading by example to show that another way is possible. A sincere thank you from our small team here (mostly) in Brooklyn.

Our initial roll out in April coincided with a trade war that took our launch plans for a spin. We understand that impacted our new relationship with our earliest pre-orders who endured months of delays, some initial bugs and at times our inability to keep up with the support inbox. We can say with full confidence we have the most understanding supporters a brand like Light could ever ask for - users who really believe in the mission and are rooting for us to succeed. Likewise, we are so proud of our small team and their passion for this project. Everyone has been all hands on deck the past couple of months getting us through this phase. We realize it hasn’t been easy and we appreciate each and every one of you.

We’ve learned a lot and we're looking forward to the next chapter for the Light Phone III. Here’s a recap of the first six months since launch.

General Updates

Proud to share that the Light Phone III was named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2025. It also won the 2025 Esquire Gadget Award for “Best Phone That’s Not A Smartphone” category. The phone continues to get coverage across a lot of publications like NY Mag’s Strategist, FT, Vice, Telegraph, Atlantic, Deezen, Business Insider, Fast Company, Elle and Psychology Today. Love seeing the phone out in the world!

The Light Phone III voted one of Time's Best Inventions of 2025.

The 2025 Esquire Gadget Awards

In addition to the big publications, we love seeing the ways actual users have talked about their experience with the new phone on blogs and such: Bobby Miller, Benji Rodgers, Analog Notes, Reformed Reader, Minimalis Tech, Awkward Engineer, and Your Friend Owen.

Photo credit: Sara Covey of Analog Notes

Our biggest priority (and struggle) these past six months has been getting phones produced as quickly as we'd like so we can have inventory available for immediate purchase.

We opened a second fulfillment center outside of the U.S. to improve our international operations and to mitigate any future risks of the trade war. Previously, we shipped all phones from our U.S. fulfillment center.

We’ve been working on our internal customer support processes for efficiency and observability - trying to get better at getting through the inbox in a timely manner, appropriately prioritizing urgency, and improving how issues are responded to and tracked. In our studio, we’ve successfully repaired a screen, wheel, all of the various buttons, battery, camera, camera lens, and back glass for different customers (yet to repair a charging port).

Some carrier certifications have been dragging on; we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. It has been a painfully slow process, but we're relieved to say we are in the final stretch and have been talking with carriers about retail opportunities and partnerships.

New pre-orders today are expected to ship in September 2026.

There will be an upcoming survey to help us gather more feedback as we prioritize our next development work.

LightOS Tips

We put together a quick little video of some LightOS tips that we hope might make using the phone a bit easier!

LightOS Tips from The Light Phone on Vimeo

Playing in picture-in-picture

A brief overview of a few tips and shortcuts within the LightOS that you might find useful.

We also pulled together some third party resources outside of the Light ecosystem in the hopes that they might be useful for other users as well. This includes sms rideshare platforms like Tremp, sms assistants like SmarterDumbphone or Light Friend and a special offer for the privacy protection platform mePrism. Thanks to everyone for sharing these with us!

Software

Overall our development team has prioritized stability, performance and bug fixes. We’ve invested a lot in our error logging capabilities which makes us more efficient when investigating bug reports and can give us the ability to see the impact of some of our fixes visually.

Here is an example of the positive impact from our recent firmware release which aimed to fix a ‘boot looping’ issue. You can see how instances of this issue start to decline over the course of the week we rolled out the firmware update from the 29th through the 3rd:

We’ve managed to fix a variety of smaller bugs across various tools as well (review our full software change log). A few notable improvements we’ve rolled out since launch include night display mode, electronic stabilization for video mode, and map gestures.

We invested in expanding and optimizing some of our servers to better support our new, larger user base. This includes reworking contact syncing performance.

Our next priorities are still mostly ongoing improvements, refinements and bug fixes to existing tools like Calendar, Podcasts, Music, Directions and Notes. We have a few other features in beta testing like biking directions, adding alternative characters and copy/paste to all keyboard instances, the ability to rotate images and eSIM support. Fingerprint ID is a work in progress that includes a complete overhaul of our lock screen, but is a bit further away from being ready. We are in conversation with potential partners for larger features and tools that we look forward to sharing more about soon.

Example of Night Display Mode

Prototyping Accessories & Silver Model

We’ve continued exploring new accessories like battery covers, screws, docks, new case colors and even an alternative Light Phone III silver model. For the battery covers we are really enjoying the textured options. These are not yet available since our priority is still the current Light Phone III production. However, they are coming soon :)

spray painted colored battery cover testing

testing colors and materials for potential battery covers

sample of a faux leather texture battery cover

prototype of a "silver" natural anodized aluminum Light Phone III

User Created Accessories

In the meantime, we thought it could be cool to highlight some user-created accessories that are out there today. Here is the Light Phone III step file if you'd like to try to make any accessories of your own.

Beam Collective

Caleb, a Light Phone III user, created this awesome 3D Printed Dock for Light Phone III. He also made a really cool video of the creation process as well as generously offering the CAD files for free so other users could make their own.

Javaboost

Harry, also a user, created these wallet cases for the Light Phone III as well as the Light Phone II.

Dumbwireless

Daisy and Will from Dumbwireless created a really cool card case for the Light Phone III.

MelWerk

Stefan, also a user, created these faux suede pouches for the Light Phone III.

Hand and Hide Leather Case

They created a custom leather case for the Light Phone III.

From Reddit Community

We also love to see the community sharing free models for 3D printed accessories like this loudspeaker dock or slim case.

User Stories

It's so cool to hear stories from friends and family about witnessing a phone in the wild or overhearing strangers talking about it. We love getting asked "what is that?" when someone sees the phone. And of course, the inbound notes we receive are the most are humbling and inspiring part of this whole project. We have a shared Slack channel for these messages and it means so much for us to read them together and keep the bigger picture in mind.