Flip phones are so back

0:02Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of T9 Texting. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're going to talk about minimalist phones. Specifically the new LightFlip, a very cool kind of minimalist smartphone, maybe call it a dumb phone device from a company called Light that has spent more than the last decade trying to figure out how to frankly rescue you from your smartphone. I think the world has changed in a lot of ways that make sense for what Light has been trying to do for a long time. And I also think Light has changed in some really interesting ways. So Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Light, is going to come on the show.

0:35We're going to talk about what it takes to make a great flip phone in 2026 and why in the world you would even want to do that. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 28th, 2026. Apple just officially launched its new upgrade program, which essentially allows you to lease Apple devices. The system works like this. You pay for a device in installments, you get a MacBook Air for 25 bucks a month, or you pay$12 a month and you get an iPad Air. After 24 months, you can either pay the rest and keep it, you can upgrade to the latest model and keep financing, or you can just return it and be done.

1:10This is all obviously happening to make it more palatable to buy new Apple gear, which like everything else in tech is getting seemingly more expensive by the day. But if you're asking me, you should buy nice things and keep them longer, not get in the habit of renting gadgets. Meanwhile, there might be a new upgrade in that program relatively soon. Bloomberg reported today that Apple is about to start a big push into the smart home and that it could launch a new smart home hub as soon as this October. It sounds like a HomePod crossed with an iPad, if that makes sense. There's also a new Apple TV and a new HomePod mini coming soon.

1:42And it seems like even the robot arm with a screen we've been hearing about might really be happening. But all of this is really based on Siri AI. If Apple's assistant is finally good, it could be a game changer. But that's a big if. And finally, XMoney, the payment platform that Elon Musk has been promising for some time, is finally rolling out to the US to premium and premium plus X users. This is a big part of the whole plan to make X the everything app and has been part of the plan since Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter all the way back in 2022. But I don't know, y 'all. I'm not sure mixing social media and super easy money transfers is a really good idea.

2:18You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 28th. Support for this show comes from BetterHelp. Have you ever had so many tabs open that your computer starts slowing down? Life can feel like that too. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report found that 74 % of Americans believe society still discourages asking for help. Therapy can help you sort through what's taking up space and quietly affecting you. With BetterHelp, connect with a licensed therapist online and switch anytime. Maybe it's time to close a few tabs. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Vox Pods to get started.

2:59Hey, everybody. Sue Bird here. This week on Bird's Eye View, I'm thrilled to be joined by Paige Beckers right before All-Star Weekend. We talk about how she's handled all the expectations and pressures since becoming a high school phenom, how AZ, Arike, and Jess Shepard have brought the wings to another level and her latest internet obsession. Hot dogs and pickles. You heard that correctly. Check out this week's Bird's Eye View on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's talk phones. Joining me now, Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Light. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

3:32I appreciate it. So you and I have talked intermittently over the last, I would say, decade about what are we going to do about all of these smartphones. And I think we've come to a really fun point in that conversation that I am eager to get to. But I do just kind of want to rewind all the way back to the beginning. I was back on your Kickstarter page from 2015 looking at the original Light Phone. There's a video of Baby Kai explaining what you're doing. But I was struck in reading the Kickstarter page and watching the video that you didn't come into this As far as I could tell with grand theories about defeating the smartphone and addiction to technology, you were building something else, maybe something more specific.

4:16So, like, rewind me back a decade or so. What were you thinking about smartphones the very first time you set out to make what became the first Light Phone? Almost like a reaction. I remember a reaction to the observation or just the weirdness I felt when I was in public. watching people sitting in the park with the family on their phone, in the restaurant, everyone swiping in the trend station, airport. And I think at the time, my co-founder Joe Hollier and I were in this incubator that Google started for designers as well. So we had the chance to speak to a lot of VCs, really successful entrepreneur apps, specifically platforms.

5:02and obviously being, you know, kind of encouraged to that direction. But I remember just vividly that almost everyone's talking about the traction of how much time their users spend in the app, you know, bragging about, oh, my user spent two hours in my game. That's why we could collect all this data, you know, we synthesize it, and we could, you know, sell it to the highest bidder. I mean, not in those honest words, but that's exactly what happened. Yeah, that was peak engagement, right? That was everybody's favorite metric at the time was how long can we keep you here? That is an unalloyed good thing if we can keep you in our app.

5:42Yeah, and the business model makes sense. I get it. It's very efficient, which is why I met Google or Facebook, Twitter are a billion dollar company. It's very efficient. I get it. But at the same time, you know, I was asking myself, what about me? What about my time? All I wanted to do is just use this specific tool like getting a direction home or getting a Uber home. Why do I have to suffer through advertisement? So I want to build a phone for myself that just have the right, just have the thing I wanted to do and then move on. And we did a test with, I think, 20 participants at the time that took away.

6:22We took away the smartphone, asked people to go out, you know, for a couple of hours, for a day, come back and tell us how you feel. Like almost everyone said, oh, wait, I spent two hours in the museum in MoMA. I remember seeing this. I remember talking to this guy. Oh, I was in grocery stores. I don't have nothing to swipe. I was nervous, but then someone talked to me and I thought, we start talking about this and that. And everyone feel like they're free. They feel like they're outside a cage. They feel, they're saying, oh, this is the best hours after the day, the best day after the week. And I think that's sort of solidified this direction of we want to offer design, offer something that I would encourage people to break away from this 24-7 connection.

7:13Okay, I wanted to start there because I want to explain to you sort of my sense of the timeline since then. And then I want to know if the way you've experienced it making products matches the way that I've seen it sort of reporting on and living in this world. So I think back then, 2015, 2016, that experience you had and the way that you were feeling about technology, there were definitely people who felt that way. And I think if you sort of explained people, it was a real kind of this is water phenomenon that if you were like, look around at all of these people looking at their phones instead of playing with their children, people would be like, oh, sure.

7:46But I don't think most people were feeling that super acutely about themselves in their day to day life. and then I think we got to the point where uh you know fast forward a few years we get through Cambridge Analytica we start to experience a real tech backlash there is the sense that I'm spending too much time on my phone the algorithmic feeds start to come in and I think then we get to a point where everybody kind of intellectually understands that they would like to use their smartphone less and I think uh then COVID happens and throws this makes this all weird because we all sit in front of screens and our phones for you know a year because there's that one aside, I think there was this sense for a long time that if you asked somebody, do you spend too much time on your smartphone?

8:27They would probably say yes. And then if you ask, are you doing anything about it? And really deep down, are you interested in doing anything about it? Most people would say no. And then I think you get to the last, I don't know, 18 months, and it feels like something has flipped that actually in a really meaningful way, maybe as a response to the ever encroaching algorithms, maybe as a response to AI, People are not only understanding that they want to make these changes and that they ought to make these changes and that these things are an incursion in their lives, but are actually actively doing something about it.

9:02Is that, again, you've been selling people phones along these lines this whole time. Does my experience of this match yours or have you seen it happen differently? No, I think it's somewhat similar. I think of the use analogy that using your smartphone is like smoking. Smoking used to be cool and indoor. You could smoke whatever you want to smoke, right? No one's, don't say anything about it. And it's a fun one because for a long time, nobody knew it was a problem. It was, it was like, it was, it was not an issue. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then, and then at some point, this whole society's attitude towards smoking changed.

9:41I mean, partially because education, partially because awareness. and then the government start to find, try to find policy to change that. And people start to like, you know, like asking people, oh, don't smoke around me and stuff like that. I think this is really similar to the trajectory of smoking okay, smoking cool. Ooh, maybe not. Ooh, that's not smoke, right? And smartphone is the same thing. I think it's like, oh, you know, smartphone, social media, so good. this very, very helpful network and getting the community together. It's like, ooh, I feel horrible. Ooh, you know, like I spent so much time on it.

10:21What do I do? And then, you know, now we're in this phase of what government do, what can we do, what parents do. This feels like a good segue to your new device, the LightFlip, which I think is frankly not the device I expected you to make. I think the sort of march of LightPhone has been, and again, you and I have talked about this many times, towards this question of what is the least you need to do in order to replace people's smartphones in a sort of meaningful way. Because I think the learning from the first phone was phone calls is not enough. You made a thing that made phone calls and people were like, well, I need a phone that does two or three other things in order for me to leave it alone.

11:00And then you give them those couple of things and they say, oh, but wouldn't it be awesome if I could do these other two things? And everybody has two things and everybody's list is different. And I've had this conversation with so many people trying to make these sort of minimalist devices over the years. And it's like you eventually get to the point where you say, OK, most people in the world use WhatsApp. Let's give them WhatsApp. And then you're one small step away from just installing Android and giving people an Android phone. And so finding that line, I think, is really hard. But with the Light Phone 3, I think you were getting closer.

11:29And when you shipped the thing, you were still working on some of the stuff. The NFC was still coming. Video chat was still coming. But you were sort of on this road to we're going to nail this middle ground of what a minimalist smartphone is supposed to be that sort of looks and feels and operates like a smartphone but is is able to do some of the stuff and then you just took a big right turn into a completely different form factor tell me about that right turn yeah of course uh i mean i i never thought about creating or bring back to flip the phone again uh to be honest with you because that's where my career started uh is it really i didn't know that yeah yeah after graduate school i went design school after that uh i was part of a broader team that tried to bring modula razor to life wow and i never thought about i'm going to be working on designing a flip phone again but the last two years we just got so many people emailing us saying oh i love life phone well sorry bragging about ourselves oh i love what you guys trying to do uh uh and and can but I don't want to be seeing using a smartphone.

12:35Can you build a flip phone? I love flip phone. And I was like, maybe this is just an outliner. We keep getting those requests from, especially younger than me, generations that wanted a flip phone. And I keep thinking this might be just the nostalgia, retro, temporary thing. And so we keep getting those emails. So I set out to interview, I think, 15 young people that use flip phone religiously. And so I start talking to them. I was like, dude, I know you know life phone. And how do you feel about flip phone? Why do you stick with flip phone? And they're like, oh, my flip phone sucked. They are ugly.

13:19They're stupid. And there's no updates. You know, I can't repair them. And I switched like five phones since like 2009. But they stick with it. And I was like, you know, you know, you can get a light phone. Whatever phone you want to get. Like why stick with flip phone? And there's a couple of things. Number one, it's very affordable. You know, so they want to get a flip phone. Number two, they love the satisfaction of opening up. And you could shut it down and flip down and the technology goes away. It represents something. It's almost like a badge of honor for some people that I could put down the technology and goes away.

14:00There's no screen. Well, some of them still have screen outside, but it goes away. It sounds so ridiculous to say that out loud, but I'm absolutely convinced there is something real to that. I really am. There's something to saying, I am finished with my phone now and you close it. There is something in that that I think is honestly powerful. We do that all the time. We put our smartphone face down, the same idea. Yeah, they love that action. And then we heard from some hardcore flip phone users that they just don't want to be seen using a glass, like texting on a glass. They want this flip, they want this phone factor.

14:37This phone factor represents something else to them. I think it presents almost like a movement they wholeheartedly believe in or the opposite of all this AI everywhere, all this invasive practice or AI, everything you touch, and what does that benefit me? A lot of them have that question too. What does that got to do with me? I have that question too. What's all this thing got to do with me? I know the benefit. I know the use case. Some use cases are really helpful. But I think this generation, at least from my understanding, I don't speak for them, but my understanding, they value their own freedom.

15:19them. They don't want to subscribe to the agenda that technology companies are pushing. You know, they value real life experience. So the implication here is that it's actually not just a sort of individual tool for not using your smartphone so much. It's actually a status symbol. It's like, this is so funny because I think, again, you and I came up in the age where you, like, I remember who my last friend was to get a smartphone and we all made fun of them for still having a flip phone when everybody else had smartphones because it's like oh well you're you're just you're the loser being left behind by technology and you're saying that now you know two decades later that has come all the way back around and actually you're what you're saying is like if you're 17 you're looking at your friends with smartphones being like oh you're the you're the sheep beholden to big tech companies i'm free look at my flip phone i love that i love that so much it's so ridiculous but i love it so much but i'm different it's like similar to how when iphone first on the market, right?

16:18People feel when they buy this object, they feel they're a different kind of person. It represents what their belief system. I have an internet incentive with my laptop, my tablet. You know, I know I could do social media things and emails here and there. And I don't want to carry this thing 24-7. And this is something we've been talking about too. Like, I'm not asking people to give up technology. We're trying to say we have different car, different shoes, different jacket designed for different purpose, higher price, lower price, different purpose, right? When it comes to phone the last 20 years, for some reason, it just has to be smartphone.

16:53And they all look the same anyway. iPhone, Android, absolutely all the same anyway. And there's no other option. You could obviously buy a flip from 20 years ago. It's 2G, 3G. Reception sucks. No one care about it. No one's selling them. Coverage is horrendous. And there's no other option. And it's just like, so unviolence. and yeah, I guess that's where we come in. Okay. So tell me about the process of designing a flip phone for 2026. I think the phone factor, obviously, the product looks different as a flip phone, but I actually think the software, it's what those group of people already value, meaning that the LightFlip and LightFone 3 software, user interface, operating system, are essentially the same.

17:41And we have a toolbox or tool library, I call it, aka App Store, a tool library that we in our community created and that has just essential tools. And that will apply to both Light Phone 3 and Light Flip. So you still have all the modern essential tools that we design as a company and the community created for Light Phone. And those tools will follow the same principle of no advertisement, do one thing well, and no infinite fees. So the tool will continue to grow. I want to give everyone, like we talk about, give everyone all the modern essential tools I can create. We're just slow because we're smaller.

18:24But I want to have a toolbox that has all the tools that you need. And you can use that on Light Phone 3 or Light Flip. And so essentially software design, the same, it's similar with iPhone 3, that hasn't changed. But the flip phone, we take away touchscreen for the phone factors and all the navigation settings was through the navigation pad. Is that again, because people are like, I don't want to be seen typing on glass, like in a very real way, or like we have to make it not look like this is a smartphone cut in half. We have to actually change the interaction system here. Well, I think, you know, there's no point touching the screen with the keypad.

19:00I'm fair. Sure. I always say this. The whole keypad, I'm a big fan of Deterine, the calculator's buttons. And I want to recreate those buttons, be so tactile, design well with the curvature, so press down and travel down well. So I want to recreate those buttons with navigation pad. And with that pad, there's no point touching your screen. And you flip it down, there's a screen, you flip it up, there's no confusion of where to touch. versus the Light Phone 3. The Light Phone 3 is a glass screen, it's a touch panel, so it makes sense. And I want the part that looks visually, like, you know, it still has a little speaker grill on the Light Flip.

19:41And when you open it, there's a screen, and there's a key. That's it. So it's just honest and straightforward. That's how I usually design things. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets.

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20:33What kind of technology was hard to do here? I mean, I think, especially this long into the smartphone revolution, I would assume it's actually, in a lot of ways, probably easier to build a smartphone than it is to build a flip phone in 2026. Is that true? Yeah, it is true. It is true. The caveat being, the problem being, because no one is making, mass-producing flip phones. So a lot of components are we need to revive them. We need to talk to suppliers to build it for the flip phone. Compared to a smartphone, there's a lot of common parts, which also contribute to the cost. Smartphone company, it builds a smartphone, a lot of common parts, a lot of suppliers, so price are lower.

21:15But if you try to make a customized phone, like Light Phone 3 or Light Flip, your cost is just higher. It just gives nothing, no way out. So give me an example. What's a hard thing inside of the light flip? Well, like a hinge. Who is making hinge now? Hinge, you know, is making it. So, you know, there's still some vintage phones being built, but there's not a lot of suppliers fighting to build hinge. So suppliers are fighting to build really good display. Memory. We all know what happened there with the memory. So those are like common components, lots of supply, all of their memory, and of course they're cheaper.

21:58And like hinge, you know, a smaller display, even smaller displays are hard to find, especially high resolution because, you know, all smartphones are huge and big and entertainment center, right? So components, sourcing components, are going to be more difficult for the film. yeah it's an interesting mix of there's almost no one out there trying to do this thing and do it in a high-end way uh and i don't even necessarily mean that as a knock on other flip phones it's just that most of most of their purpose is to be retro very simple very straightforward very retro and very cheap right like that that is their job and there aren't a lot out there trying to make this thing nice in a sort of meaningful way yeah i guess that's where we come in because you to obviously buy a 20 years ago vintage flip phone, the shell, the guard, and just rebrand it and sell it.

22:55That's easy. I mean, not easy, but relatively easier. But we want to intentionally build this device from hardware, software, replaceable battery. We'll stand behind the flip phone as long as we're here to repair your device. We also want to make it really affordable, which is why we launch with a$39 per month contract offer. Comes with a SIM card, one gigabyte data, unlimited talk. So you pay$39 a month for your phone and your service plan. That's it for LifeLit. So I want to make it accessible too. And we get all this feedback from LifeLit. LifeLit 3 is so expensive,$699. I mean, I'll argue all day about that, but I get it.

23:39On that front, actually, I think the price is one of the things that was striking to me because it feels like sort of a return to form from the original Light Phone. Like, again, in a certain way, I feel like you've come all the way back around to, I think you spent some time, and you can confirm or deny this, but I think you spent some time trying really hard to convince people to not buy smartphones. You mentioned hopefully shipping early next year. Tell me about Life as a hardware company right now. We are deep in Ramageddon. Are you worried about this moment in trying to actually build and ship consumer devices for people?

24:16Yeah, it's pretty difficult, to be honest with you. Like the tariff implementation since last year is horrendous. Our cost is exponentially higher. You can't move your factories anywhere else because there's no one making things here that's affordable. Or we can move to a different country. but tariffs are different. And now memory, it's all being bought by data centers, AI data centers, and the suppliers, it's obviously understandable, shifting the focus to supplying memory DRAM to the AI servers. And all the consumer electronics are going to increase price because we can't buy memories, we can't buy cheap memories because they're all being used in AI centers.

25:01So I expect this price of all consumer electronics to increase very soon. So our life is difficult, but at the same time, we've been here for 11 years. We went through COVID. We went through tariff. Now memory is just another thing. And we believe in what we're doing. I think it's important that as a society, we have the option like this. And so we de-risk, diversify our platform. We're using a media tech platform versus Qualcomm. like Feng Shui is using Qualcomm like Flip or using MediaTag they all have different memory approved vendors so we could choose from so you know we're not we're not just you know limited to certain suppliers so we try to diversify our vendor base so at the same time diversify manufacturers so we de-risk ourselves and the last thing would be the last thing would be just our service plan bundle sales I was shamelessly promoting it because it helped us de-risk that too.

26:09So the hardware sales are less sensitive to us because the value that our customers give us is not just one of hardware sales, it's a continuous revenue stream to support our software development and software growth in the company as well. The last few years, it's definitely difficult, but I think we've been here for decades now. we know we know what we're trying to do uh we know i know where we could diversify to de-risk so uh and i'm excited about life flip i i think you know something like that um as an option uh is necessary yeah okay and then last thing the do you think there is a looming trend in this kind of gadget i think we've been waiting for the like disintermediation of the smartphone for some time now and there's been this trend where everybody's going and buying old canon power shots uh wired headphones yeah wired headphones is a great example but i think what we're what we haven't seen yet is a new spin on those old devices right canon has not put out the 2026 version of that power shop people are buying old ones do you think do you think we're due for a new round of this new thinking on these kinds of old pre-smartphone gadgets because there is this real interest in them a single purpose device single purpose object are always a thing we we just we just try we just went too far on cramping everything in a piece of glass but you know like uh uh i don't know a really good speaker can still make the camera i don't i think it's less It's about going back in time, retro product, but it's more about this trend of designing single-purpose object, a typewriter, a camera, a phone, a chair.

28:03Like when an object designed for single purpose, we as a customer, a consumer user, we filter. that. That's why when you pick up a camera or you sit on a really well-designed chair, you feel that. And that experience is way different than trying to do everything on a single piece of glass. When you try to do that, I mean, I think some famous designers said that, not me, but when you're trying to design a thing, build a thing for everyone in every purpose. Nothing is special. Like, you don't feel anything because you play, like I said, play your piano on your phone and guitar on your phone. Like, nothing is special.