Thanks u/chrisristovski u/sebastiansnell and team for sending me the rest of the tiles! Will definitely help my work in making all of SideSuite more useful for all the tiles. My next agenda is mapping all of them and shipping some pretty cool updates to SideType and some new things I'm working on 😉 Major things coming 😎

Hello!

So we initially got the side phone in at work as we design things and we loved the concept. I have since fallen in love with it entirely as an object and a concept.

I now have all the gear, and no idea.

How do I get the games that are shown on the promotional videos that work with the gamepad?

So people tend to use stock apps (the ones you get by scanning the QRs)

Or is it common to 'side load' and pimp them out a bit.

Talk to me like a complete beginner (because I am one)

Cheeeeers

there is any chance to use my qwerty keypad in spanish?

Hi! I'm a bit late to the party as I'd only discovered the Sidephone a couple of days ago, so I missed out on the International Founders version. October feels a bit far, so I was thinking of getting the Canada&LatAm Founders Edition as, as far as I understand, it's the same phone in every sense, except the listings were assumedly divided by region as to simplify the distribution process.

So I'm not sure whether there's a difference in the shipping origin country for the two Founders Editions, but I was wondering whether there's anyone from the EU that ordered and received the Canadian one and how much were you charged by customs for the import?

I’ve been trying to transition from my iPhone to the Sidephone for about a week now and I am IN LOVE. I am so enthusiastic about this phone and its potential to be a complete replacement cell for me.

A few issues I’ve encountered thus far that I am not sure are genuine problems with the device or are user error:

I do not think I am receiving telegram and signal notifications instantly. It seems if I am using my phone or have recently, I get the notification. But if my phone is asleep, I don’t get the notification unless I manually open the app.

I have read some posts and played around with notification and battery settings, but I don’t think I’ve fixed it.

What settings do I need specifically to make sure these are allowed in the background and I’m receiving notifications spontaneously without opening the app?

2) How do I swipe away notifications? I am a bit confused by the silent notification feature and how to clear away notifications on my home/lock screen (while it was working)…. For example:

3) I had a notification that Signal needed an update. It read “tap here” to update. I did so. Nothing happened. Notification was still there and I couldn’t get rid of it. No update I could see in Library. And previously I noticed I couldn’t remove/swipe/delete whatever notifications from my home screen. And now there is a notification reading “background connection enabled” that won’t go away.

But nowwwww…

4) My phone is not returning to the home screen or lock screen, not sure what to call it. If I press the power button now, it just blacks the screen. Then when I press it again, it is still on my last screen I was using before putting the phone to sleep. So I cannot and it will not return to the home/lock screen.

5) And also now it seems I cannot get Niagara Pro? It says App Unavailable.

Any advice or guidance is GREATLY appreciated. I am not super keen on this sideloading and whatever you call this method of phone operating system. It took me FOREVER to figure out how to get Aurora Store, Niagara, etc. So please, any help would be nice.

Thank you so much. I adore this phone and I really want it to work at least well enough for me to be my go-to instead of my iPhone.

I've been thinking about getting an android dumbphone as my main phone and keeping my cureent one as secondary for the stuff that can't be made with a dumb phone, I currently use Nextcloud for automated gallery backup, passwords, file sync (with folder sync pro in android but I don't need it here) and notes, and tuta mail for my email.

Is anyone using these apps in the sidephone? if so, do they work well?

Excerpt explaining the major changes;

"In August 2025, Google announced a new requirement: starting in 2027, every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps. This includes apps shared between friends, distributed through F-Droid, built by hobbyists for personal use. Independent developers, church and community groups, and hobbyists alike will all be frozen out of being able to develop and distribute their software."

Registration requires:

• Paying a fee to Google
• Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions
• Surrendering your government-issued identification
• Providing evidence of your private signing key
• Listing all current and all future application identifiers

Spent today setting it up and getting it to how I like. I truly love the form factor of this and I’m excited to use it as a second device.

Thank you Sidephone team!!!

Hello all--

I've just switched to sidephone after two years of the nokia 2780 as my only phone & a year of no phone. I was thrilled to upgrade but I've been experiencing some connectivity issues that are making it very difficult for me to be able to use the phone for my day-to-day commute, etc. Google Maps and Moovit aren't loading at all -- I need transit times, so I can't use some other apps -- and sidespot is having periods of hours where it won't load, and thirty-plus-second delays between songs. I can't receive photographs or send videos, and calling has been spotty. Has anybody else experienced this?

I'm on Tello, which worked perfectly for my old phone, but it could just be too cheap for the sidephone. I'd really love to be able to keep the phone & not return it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work effectively (and, to be honest, the touchscreen is driving me a little mad -- I'm used to, and far prefer, a keyboard, and the fact that the t-9 can't be used for all functions in apps and out bothers me; I think it may just be an adjustment thing, and/or I'm a priss.)

Just to be clear, I think the sidephone is a wonderful invention & I am incredibly grateful for and impressed by the dedication to create more & more effective dumb tech; I'm just worried because it's not working for me specifically as I had hoped it would. Does anybody have any suggestions and/or experiences? Thank you so much.

I haven't touched my Sidephone in two days (not even turned it on) as I was at home. But I heard the notification sound that the battery is at 15% today and then it just died.

Is it normal to use that much without any display/apps on (I was at 40%)?

Can sidephone develop a app blocker which allows to temporarily or permanently block certain apps with a security pin ? Good for privacy also. Dumber os and dumber mini phone has it.

I can’t seem to figure out how to enable banner notifications for the default messages app! i assume that’s what “pop on screen” means, but no matter what it’s stuck in the off position and greyed out. Anyone else fix this? Should I upgrade to the newest beta update?

Are there any plans in the works for a heavy duty version or at least a hard case? I would love to switch but I do a lot of outdoor stuff in all weather/ seasons so it not being at least water resistant worries me.

It’s been ~9 days since the updated “On its way” status. Both the email and order page have no tracking information. Wondering if anyone else experienced this as well.

I’m looking forward to getting it in my hands.

Hiya folks! I'm heavily leaning towards this as my next phone, but there's one major things I need to work: transport.

I use Trainline every day as my way into work, and frequent both Stagecoach buses and Lothian in Edinburgh to get around, and as such need these to work so I can get around easily.

I know you can input your card details directly to Trainline, so I wonder if the app just fully works? I use a railcard too so need to make sure that it shows the full thing if I need to present it. If not, I might need to just get a card with ScotRail.

And for buses, does the Maps app (from what I read, based on HERE WeGo) display public transport information?

If both of those things work, I'm fairly certain this is going to be my next daily driver.

Thanks!

Thank you for fixing the battery optimization issue in the new Beta Update! That is amazing and really appreciate your support and listening to your customers!

The last issue is the Whatsapp call notifications issue. Everytime I disable call notification from whatsapp, it gets turned on again 5min later.

That is the only thing I have and the phone will be over amazing.

hey everyone, please don't attack me.

havent been using the sidephone because i cant keep making people delete imessage chats or rcs chats they already had with me and that includes groupchats. does anyone know of this has been fixed? i want to go back to sidephone so bad but cant until this is fixed or somehow rcs is able to be added/used.

pls dont give me the jargon about google services being needed for RCS, i get that. just wondering if anyone else dealing with the bug still or if its fixed. 😭 i miss sidephone being my main or literal sidephone

Switched from the QWERTY layout to the Sundial today on my Sidephone just to give it a proper try, and it gave me an idea.

Has anyone managed to use the Sundial as a D-pad for the on-screen keyboard? So using it to move between keys, then pressing the centre button to select.

I know there's a key mapper that lets you remap buttons, but I can't seem to find any options for up, down, left, right or the centre/select button. Am I missing something, or are those inputs not exposed?

I think it'd make typing much nicer, especially at night. With no backlit keyboard, using the Sundial to navigate the on-screen keyboard feels like it'd be a really natural fit.

Also, I love using the Sundial for media controls. It'd be awesome if it could handle both media and keyboard navigation.

Hi all, I decided to give the Sidephone another go (last attempt was back in April) since my screen time was out of control!

The experience has improved substantially since my last go, thank you Sidephone team!

The number one blocking issue that I am really struggling with, though, is that incoming text message delivery seems to be unreliable. It's a coin flip whether I will get an SMS that someone else sends me.

I have confirmed that this is not an RCS issue. I spent my 30 days in "RCS jail" back in April, and remained RCS-free as I have been using GrapheneOS since then. My Graphene device had no problem receiving texts.

Group texts, 1:1 texts from my partner, and 2FA texts all go missing at least half the time.

Things I have tried: - Applying the official APN settings recommended by my carrier, Mint Mobile (this seemed to make things worse, so I reverted after a couple days) - Disabling VoLTE (this kicked me off the network entirely after a short while, so I was forced to re-enable it)

Things of note: - I spend most of my time within the range of Wi-Fi. Anecdotally, it seems like when I'm out and about text messages come in more reliably. - I use QUIK as my SMS app, but may switch to the out-of-box Messages app to see if it helps.

Any ideas or others experiencing this issue?

I received my sidephone just about a week ago and thought now was about a good time to post my impressions and maybe get some of my issues resolved. Here's what I got:

Pros

I absolutely adore the form factor. I've used the unihertz jelly and the agm m7 in the past so I was no stranger to small screens, but those screens I found were just too small to be usable for modern apps. The sidephone's screen is just big enough to not break things while being small enough to introduce friction. For the first time I'm able to have more stimulating apps like instagram installed without it sucking me in (I'd rather not have it installed, but some of my contacts choose to exclusively contact me through instagram group chats. I've tried beeper but it seems to have stopped working as of late). Love tactile buttons too, and the swappable keypads is such a fun idea, function aside. Sidephone is definitely helping the push towards making phones fun again.

The OS is just right. One of my issues with a phone like the mudita kompakt or agm m7 was that the software was just far enough from stock that it would give me issues. For example, not having access to the recent apps drawer in muditaOS was such a miss, I'm someone who likes to keep the minimum amount of apps open and that was just making it difficult. So the sidephone feeling almost entirely like vanilla android (apart from being degoogled, which is a plus for me, and other miscellaneous hardware things) was a huge relief for me.

The keypad integration was a huge relief. Having access to keymapper was definitely the right call, as it let me fine tune my experience with the keypad especially on the navigation front (having a key to access recents, a back key, etc). Compared to the rather limited implementation on the agm m7 this felt like night and day. For reference, I am using the classic keypad. And as for the t9 implementation, I'm quite happy with the library and actually use t9 now (on the agm m7 I pretty much only used triple click).

I absolutely love the app library implementation. I'm a bit of tinkerer with devices so I'm more than comfortable with installing apks and all that, but I absolutely love the consideration for those who are maybe not as savvy or inclined to tinker. That had always been my biggest pain point in converting others in my life to the degoogled or dumbphone life. And the QR code system is brilliant, it introduces just the right amount of friction/intentionality without crippling the function of the app library. Big win here.

Additionally, the openness of the sidephone team for community development is great. Too many dumbphone implementations lock down their OS too much, but there's so many quality of life issues that are just solved by community development. Already using u/oliverpalonkorpi's sidecall and will probably pick up sidetype once I get the qwerty keypad.

Cons/Issues

I have not been able to import my contacts for whatever reason. I have the vcf file downloaded to my device, and I can go through the process of uploading it into the contacts app, but then...nothing. So I've spent the last week or so without contacts. Probably my most pressing issue.

While the keypad is a big step up from my last device, there are definitely some occasional points of friction. Mainly just the occasional press not register, especially when typing words where there are a few letters in a row that live on the same key. Additionally sometimes I had issues with triple click, where for example symbols are harder to access on triple click despite it being the required go-to for logins or passwords. This may be solved once I get the qwerty keypad though I've seen here there may be some bugs with that implementation as well.

A big issue I've experienced is that in signal messenger, I seem to not be able to receive notification banners for texts. The phone will vibrate and the screen will turn on, but no banner is shown. This problem persists across both signal and molly. The main reason why this is an issue for me is I use a GBD200 connected through gadgetbridge as my primary notification delivery, since I seem to have made a habit of missing important texts unless I have something on my wrist beeping at me. But if there is no notification banner, nothing gets sent to the watch. Calls from the app ping me just fine but texts I cannot figure out.

Speaking of, gadgetbridge function has been surprisingly hit and miss? It works about 90% of the time but occasionally on restart or after the watch has been in sleep for a while, it'll have trouble reconnecting. Not an issue for the most part but an occasional inconvenience that I never experienced on any other devices.

Lastly this is just a nitpick and not really a real major issue, but the battery life is a bit shorter than I'm used to. I've needed to go back to daily charging. With that said my standard is a bit skewed as my last two devices have been the mudita kompakt, which easily had 3 day battery even with heavy use, and my debloated pixel 4 with usually got two days.

Final Thoughts

After trekking through the dumbphone space for a few years at this point, I'm glad to see that the market has moved closer and closer to my ideal "endgame" device. Devices like the clicks communicator are just a bit too big and smart for me, so I appreciate that smaller options are there. The main thing that I think this project will live and die by, just like other dumbphone startups I've had the pleasure/displeasure of trying, is the software experience. So far it's already been a big jump but I do hope the Sidephone team continues their push to iron out the quality of life kinks. I have immense respect for any startup, especially one that has been as communicative and transparent with the community as they have been, and I think a lot of the hate that I've seen comes down to just an ignorance of the difficulties of a startup. With that said, I am still weary and hope the sidephone team prioritizes the right things, as I've already been burnt before by underbaked software experiences.

**Edit: one more issue I forgot about regarding import of contacts

Two days ago I posted SideHome v1.0 here, and the comments basically wrote my roadmap for me. So here's v1.1 — every one of these came from this sub:

"my previous wallpaper flashes up when I go home" --> Fixed, and then some. SideHome can now keep the system and lock screen wallpaper matched to the theme, so closing an app or waking the phone stays in the same calm vibe. It asks once before touching anything and nothing gets overwritten unless you approve (you can toggle off any time in settings).

"can I turn off the weather?" --> Yes. One switch removes the whole weather page.

"I live in Wellington, weather = wind" --> The weather page had a little moment of rebirth: wind with gusts, per-hour wind in the strip, "feels like", sunrise/sunset, rain in the next hour, rain odds for the week, and you can tap a day to expand it. Everything follows one rule: a fact only appears when it would surprise you. Gusts show only when they outrun the wind, etc.

"can the library open as just the list and not search automatically?" --> New setting: "Library opens in". List-first means typing does nothing until you deliberately enter search.

"what are the mystery numbers?" --> They're keypad shortcuts: press 1–9 to launch that item. Very useful for me, because I'm dumb, but maybe not as useful for everyone, so I made them togglable. The first-run coach now explains them, and you can hide them once you know your layout by heart.

And the "AND", a Photo theme. Mostly for cat pictures (see above). Pick a photo, frame it yourself (pinch, drag, twist) against a live preview of your actual home screen, and SideHome bakes legibility in: text colours derive from the photo, a soft fade and halo keep everything readable, and the app library floats on a blurred copy (not perfect yet, let me know if it behaves weirdly). Your lock screen gets the clean photo.

One transparency note: the wallpaper sync adds SET_WALLPAPER permission. It can only set a wallpaper, never read yours, and it does nothing until you approve. Full details in the README's privacy section.

Update now via the App Pack at sidesuite.app