About
A first phone without the internet in it. Kids want to call grandma and their friends; parents don’t want to hand them a smartphone. Open Lounge Phone is a real phone with real keys and a handset — and nothing else. No browser, no games, no strangers: it can only reach the people a guardian approves, and it goes quiet at bedtime.
A phone that belongs to the room, not the person. In lounges, clubs and phone booths, the same hardware becomes a shared phone: take it over with your own contacts, see who’s around to chat, and it forgets you when you leave.
Principles
Section titled “Principles”- Default deny. A phone only talks to people explicitly allowed on it, in both directions.
- No hosted dependency. You run it — on your own free Cloudflare account or on your own hardware with Docker. There is no central service, and this project never sees your calls.
- Screen-light by design. Keys, lights and voice first; a small status strip at most.
- Repairable. Hot-swap keys, a plug-in display, a standard coiled handset cord.
- Open. Software under AGPL-3.0-or-later, hardware under CERN-OHL-S-2.0. If you run a modified server for others, you share your changes.
Status
Section titled “Status”| Part | State |
|---|---|
| Wire protocol, access control, quiet hours | done |
| Self-hosted server, browser phone emulator, companion app | done |
| Cloudflare backend (Workers, Durable Objects, D1, TURN) | done |
| Invites, passkeys, voicemail with transcripts | done |
| One-command deploy, desktop app | next |
| Lounge features | planned |
| ESP32-S3 firmware and custom PCB | in design |
See the introduction for the full picture and contributing to get involved.