Lounge phone

A Lounge phone is a shared phone — in the living room, a kitchen, a shared house, a studio or a venue (a team or organization space works too). It has no contacts of its own. Anyone in the space picks it up and uses it as themselves: it calls and is called with exactly their permissions, and forgets them when they’re done.

Set one up

1. Open <your server>/device/ on an old phone or tablet (or a hardware phone), choose Add to Home Screen, open it and pick Lounge phone.
2. A guardian pairs it like any phone (Pair a phone) and picks Lounge phone as how it will be used.

Lounge phones are listed on Home under Lounge phones, with who’s at each. Guardians get Manage on each: rename it, or Remove and wipe it.

The idle phone shows a QR code on its display. Each code works once and only for a couple of minutes; the phone fetches a new one by itself.

Use it

1. Scan the code with your own phone’s camera. It opens the companion app on the Use this phone page (sign in first if needed).
2. Tap Use this phone. The phone now flashes one key — press it on the phone within 30 seconds. This proves you’re really there: a photo of the code is useless from anywhere else.
3. The phone says Hi <your name> and puts your speed-dial on its keys: the household phones you’re allowed to call, then the other grown-ups (or your own phone’s keys, if you have one). Calls to you ring the Lounge phone too.

Guests from other servers

A guardian can let people who have an account on another Open Lounge Phone server use the space’s Lounge phones: Lounge settings → Let people from other servers use these phones (off by default). A guest scans the code, enters their own address on the page that opens, and continues on their own server, which vouches for them. They still press the flashing key. The phone greets them and its keys dial their connections, placed by their own server. Calls to them ring the Lounge phone as well as their own app. The session ends the same ways (and at once if the phone goes offline), and guardians see the guest’s address in the history.

Open to chat

Press MENU, then 5 (open to chat). Everyone in the household sees that you’re at the Lounge phone and open to chat, and can call you there. Press it again to turn it off. Whether people can call you still follows Available for calls in your app.

Finish

Your session ends — and the phone forgets you completely (name, speed-dial, calls) — when:

• you press MENU, then 8 Log out on the phone, or Leave in the app;
• the space’s session length runs out. Guardians choose it under Lounge settings on the Home screen: after the phone sits hung up and unused for some minutes (10 by default — a venue), at the end of the day (hot desks), or only when the person logs out (an office desk);
• someone else takes the phone over;
• the phone stays offline for more than a minute (a short Wi-Fi hiccup doesn’t log you out).

When nobody is signed in

A free Lounge phone is dead by default: its keys do nothing until someone signs in. Guardians can turn on, under Lounge settings → When nobody is signed in:

• House-line keys — keys that call as the space: a person here, someone’s desk phone, or a whole group at once, where the first to answer takes the call (a front desk, a staff group, the whole house). Not a public line: those are called only by someone signed in.
• Who’s here — the phone shows people signed in at the space’s other Lounge phones who are open to chat.

The server only records that a session happened — who, which phone, when — so guardians can see it under Lounge settings and history. Nothing about the calls is kept.