About SideSuite

I’m Oliver. I own a Sidephone SP-01 and I write these apps for it.

I came to it from a Nokia 6300. I used that as my main phone for six months, with my iPhone switched off in my bag, and it half-worked. The Nokia was slow, and it did not have the things I actually depend on: WhatsApp, banking, a bus ticket when I needed one. So I was booting the iPhone several times a day regardless. Eventually I left the iPhone on for convenience, and then I stopped carrying the Nokia at all.

What I wanted was never less technology. It was to stop drifting into social media without having decided to. The Nokia gave me that and took too much else with it. The SP-01 gives me the same thing and still runs the apps my life needs, so my iPhone has now been off for days at a stretch, and I turn it on very rarely, for work. I am more present at home and in general, and I do not miss the iPhone.

The SP-01 is not a flawless phone either, and after the Nokia I knew what that costs. The Nokia did not fail because it was a simple phone; it failed because it was annoying, and an annoying phone loses to the one in your bag. So this time I fixed the things that annoyed me instead of putting up with them.

The first one was the keyboard. I write Finnish every day, and the Compact QWERTY tile, which I like a great deal, could not type ä or ö. Sidephone’s own keyboard for it is good and it only types English, so half of what I wanted to write was unavailable. That turned into SideType, and then into thirty-odd languages, because once you’ve taught one language’s accents to ride along on the right keys, the next one is mostly data.

Then the calls. The SP-01 has no working proximity sensor, which means the screen stays live against your face and the microphone can die when the screen sleeps, without anything telling you. I hung up on people. I muted myself for minutes at a time. That turned into SideCall.

And then the home screen, because by that point I’d stopped thinking of this as fixing things and started thinking about what a phone like this could be. SideHome is a launcher whose background follows the actual sun at your latitude, so glancing at the phone tells you something about the day. It is the least necessary thing I have built, and the one I like most.

Every one of those was a gap that would eventually have sent me back to the iPhone. None of this is a complaint about the phone. I chose this phone on purpose, I still would, and the reason there’s room for three apps is that it’s an unusual enough device to have room. Small phones with swappable keypads and no Google don’t come with a mature app ecosystem. That is a fair trade, and it leaves plenty of room to build.

Why they are free: the number of people who own this phone is small, the apps are useful to me anyway, and the marginal cost of you having them is zero. Why they are open source: so they outlive my interest in them. If I lose this phone or move on, someone else can pick these up, which matters more on a device this niche than on Android generally.

There is no company here, no pricing page and no accounts. Nothing in these apps reports back on what you do with them. If you would like to help keep it going, you can sponsor the work, and if you would rather help in a way that is not money, that page says how too.

I am in Helsinki. I have been writing software since I was ten, and built my first business at seventeen, a school lunch menu app that a lot of Finnish students ended up using. Since then it has been a mix of design and engineering consulting, mostly for large companies, alongside businesses of my own, and I am building a tech startup now. None of that is phone software. SideSuite is a free-time thing. I built these to make my own Sidephone better, and released them because other people have the same phone.