Light Priorities (July 2026)

[dupontgu]

first off THANK YOU all for jumping in. We deeply appreciate all the contributions, and the suggestions/questions are really helping clarify what we should focus on. I wanted to give a quick update on how things look from the Light side so you can know what to expect from us in the coming weeks.

• Now that the SDK is out, our biggest focus is finishing up the plumbing to allow users to install Light/community tools onto their LP3s from the dashboard. And with that, we're hoping to get the Weather/2FA tools officially out in the world. This requires some pretty substantial changes to both our backend services and LightOS, so we'll be spending much of our time outside of this repository for a while (though you'll definitely see some changes to the :sdk:server module since that is now embedded inside LightOS). Expect responsiveness to dip a little bit this week, especially from me. Sorry and thanks for your patience in advance!
• I should mention that the above will not immediately address one of our biggest questions from you all so far - "How can I run the tool I am developing on an LP3". I am sure many of you are comfortable putting your phone into (Android) developer mode and using adb to quickly install local builds. We don't want this to be a requirement to work on Light Phone tools. We are working on a way to install local builds via LightOS over a local network, which will come alongside our soon-to-be-released File Manager. It's going to take a little bit of time to polish that up and bundle up into a public LightOS build. I'll post a link to the File Manager source when that goes live, and here's our blurb about it from the recent developer email update if you missed that:

The File Manager
In order to be useful, many tools require that data/content be transferred on/off the Light Phone. For example, you may want to upload your songs into the Music tool, or download your photos/videos from the Album tool onto your PC. Most of our current tools make use of our cloud-based dashboard for managing these transfers.

However, we realized that this might not be the best experience for community tools. We don’t want developers to have to deploy any server-side code, especially when, in so many cases, users just need to get files from their computer to the phone sitting a few feet away (or vice versa).

So we’ve been working on a unified File Manager, which will allow users to connect directly to their Light Phone over home wifi or hotspot and then drag, drop, and download files using a convenient browser-based interface. The files never leave the user’s home network. Any tool developed using our SDK can opt to have its own dedicated directory that shows up automatically when a user opens up the File Manager. A tool can subscribe to get an update any time the user uploads new files to its directory, and then process those files accordingly. We're also starting to update existing default tools to support the File Manager for file transfer alongside the classic dashboard.

• on the topic of adb, you maybe have noticed that Light provides no guidance on how to enable developer mode. That's because there's currently no officially supported way to do it! There are plenty of third-party resources out there for accomplishing this and we have absolutely no interest in stopping you from doing it - the hardware is yours! But we also reserve the right to break those undocumented methods without notice (we've done it without realizing). And we might try to shut the existing doors completely and open an "official" one. This would hopefully reduce friction for devs/hackers/modders and also allow us to give some users finer-grained control over that access. For example, we've heard from many parents that it wold be helpful to be able to gate developer access from the dashboard - we think that's fair. More on this to come (or not).
• As far as new SDK features go, the most requested and obvious place to start is support for media playback and recording. We hear you loud and clear and we are on it. We were hoping to have it ready by the time the SDK went live but it's taking a bit of untangling on the LightOS side. See existing conversation around this here (there are other issues that touch on this as well). We want to make sure that audio streams from different tools do not interfere, and that you can always have some amount of control (even if just play/pause) from the LightOS home screen.

Thanks again and keep the issues coming. It's an honor to work with you all. Can't wait to get these tools in people's hands!

[NubsCarson]

Hey @dupontgu — thanks for the transparency in this update, and for the "the hardware is yours" spirit. 🙏

I'm with the ElizaOS team (github.com/elizaOS/eliza). We've got an LP3 on the bench and we're big fans of what you're building — we've been through the SDK and really like the tool model. We'd love to build a lightweight, on-brand Eliza tool: a simple on-device AI companion (Ktor → our API, UnifiedPush for notifications, voice via the mic) that respects the Light ethos.

We're getting set up on the LightOS Emulator now. Totally understand the official on-device install path (dashboard + the File Manager over local WiFi) is still in the oven — if you're taking design partners for early access, we'd love to help dogfood it and share feedback. Happy to keep it fully open-source and go through your build/sign flow.

One more thing: we also run our own AOSP build (Eliza as a privileged launcher/assistant), and we want it booting on LP3 hardware. For that we'd need bootloader unlock + a device tree and kernel/GPL sources from your side — can you unlock our unit and point us to those?

Reach me at nubs@nubs.site or on Telegram @NubsCarson — happy to jump on a call. Excited to build with you.
— nubs (ElizaOS)

[dupontgu]

Hey! I'm gonna bring this to the rest of the team to see what we can do. Transparently, I'm not sure what a bootloader unlock looks like for production devices. Will likely get back to you via email.