About
Being social without social media. You still need a way to reach your family, your group and your friends. Open Lounge Phone is a phone you’re called on when you choose, by the people you choose: intentional phone time, not a phone that follows you everywhere.
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 feeds, no strangers: it can only reach the people a guardian approves, and it goes quiet at bedtime. And unlike closed kids’ phones, it’s open: a child can learn how it works and tinker with it as they grow, while the rules stay with their guardians.
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.
Not just a phone. The same board can be a house intercom, a doorbell, a dinner bell or an elder’s daily check-in. See what it can be.
Inspired by the Tin Can phone. The idea of a simple, kid-safe landline that only calls approved people comes from the Tin Can phone. Open Lounge Phone is an independent, open-source take on that idea (open hardware, your own server, federation). It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tin Can, and “Tin Can” is their trademark.
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 Cloudflare account or on your own hardware with Docker — or use the free public hub, which is just one more server. Servers federate as equals; there is no central directory, and nobody sees your call audio.
- No phone network, no text chat. A closed, spam-free network of people who accepted each other.
- Screen-light by design. Keys, lights and voice first; a small status strip at most.
- Repairable. Hot-swap keys, a drop-in display, a standard 3.5 mm handset plug.
- 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 |
|---|---|
| Server (self-hosted or Cloudflare), companion app, browser phone on any device | works today |
| Calls, voicemail with transcripts, quiet hours, passkeys and invites | works today |
| Connections across servers, the free public hub | works today; the hub is live at hub.openloungephone.app |
| Lounge phones, rooms and 3-way calls, team and organization phone systems, call recording | works today in the apps and the browser phone |
| One-command CLI, interop tests between servers and versions | done |
| Phone firmware (ESP32-S3), 0.9.x | end-to-end tests in a simulator; on the dev boards next |
| Labs firmware, 0.0.0 | the experimental build on the v0.1 dev boards for now; lightly tested |
| Circuit board, hardware v0.1 | early prototype: four phones built and working |
| Board v0.3, assembled or bare PCB | coming soon for tinkerers; no price or date |
| Board v1.0 | the one we’ll recommend building |
What changed and when: versions and releases. See the introduction for the full picture and contributing to get involved.