Light III
An embedded partnership powering ethical, minimalist technology
Collaborators
Tech stack
- Elixir Phoenix
- React
- Ember.js
- Serverless
- Kubernetes
- AOSP
Light Phone III is a minimalist phone designed to respect its users, offering only the tools they truly need. Sanctuary Computer brought the third-generation device to market through ongoing collaboration, technical stewardship, and product development with principle.
Project overview:
- 1.
For nearly a decade, we’ve been working as Light’s embedded product team, continually evolving the Light Phone II, and laying the groundwork for the system architecture, OS, and dashboard features carried forward into Light Phone III.
- 2.
We implemented a wide range of new features and improved or migrated existing features from Light II, designed to be used as tools for a better life.
- 3.
As a small, distributed team, we made consequential engineering decisions at every step of the process, from feature definition, to development, to collaborating with our Taiwanese factory partners at Foxconn.
From Light II to III
Sanctuary Computer has served as Light’s embedded product team since the early days of Light Phone II. Our past work includes designing and implementing LightOS (a custom Android fork), building the Light Dashboard web application, and managing telecom integrations for SIM activations and service provisioning.
Sanctuary developers making the first call on Light III
The foundations of Light Phone III — its operating system, tool management model, and Dashboard integration — were rooted in our earlier work. When it came time to develop Light Phone III, the team was already in deep collaboration with Light’s founders, and their values, concept, and codebase.
This long-term relationship made for a collaboration rooted in proven mutual trust. We work as partners with Light’s founders, providing product guidance alongside technical development, and helping to coordinate with international hardware partners.
Tools — not apps.
“I even like the fact that we call things tools and not applications. It gives the sense that this is really a something you're going to use with purpose.”
— Gustavo Brunoro, Sanctuary Computer developer
Camera
The biggest thing to happen to Light since the first phone hit the market in 2016 is the Light III camera. Our team implemented support for both the 50MP rear camera and the 8MP front camera, with modes for photos, video, and selfies. We engineered a smooth experience around the physical two-stage shutter button, ensuring precise focus and capture behavior.
On the software side, we built the Album tool to allow users to view photos directly on the phone, and enabled image transfer over USB so users can export their media without relying on cloud services.
As with every other feature on the phone, we built the camera with intention: no filters or automated gallery features, just the essentials to keep the user present.
Photos taken on Light III by Joe Hollier
“There’s so much going on beyond the codebase, so our team is made up of developers who can navigate that kind of ambiguity. People who are down to get on the phone with vendors and solve problems in real-time. Or to iterate with Joe to figure out a design that works well for all the weird hardware constraints.” – Conor Davidson, Sanctuary Computer developer
Sanctuary project lead Conan Lai testing out the Light camera in Taiwan.
A product shaped by trust
Light doesn’t have a massive deck of brand guidelines and product strategy, it has a philosophical starting point — build tools that enable people to live better — which all other decisions stem from. For Light, minimal UX isn’t an aesthetic treatment, it’s a choice, rooted in ethics, that our team understands and implements innately and autonomously.
As trusted, long-term partners, our developers grew into holistic stewards of the entire Light III product roadmap. Our small team was trusted to make high-impact choices around architecture, tooling, and feature behavior without layers of overhead. We updated and evolved our work from Light II, reframing legacy code, telecom quirks, and hardware integration as prompts for better design.
We migrated much of the Light II codebase without pausing feature development, refactoring as part of shipping. The team integrated with physical inputs like the brightness wheel, fingerprint sensor (still in-progress), and replaceable battery.
Light III making waves in The Verge, Wired, Forbes, Endgaget, and ZDNet.
A value-aligned community
We hosted the Light team at our New York City community space, Index, for a day of technical and philosophical talks, mindful activities, and gathering with this community of intentional tech users.
Sanctuary Computer developers in conversation with Light co-founder Joe Hollier
“There’s so much noise out there. It feels good to be working on something that helps people disconnect.” — Joseph Thomas, Sanctuary Computer developer