Time and time again, owners of dumb phones —or minimalist phones—turn to their niche communities asking for extra features for their pared-down devices: an authenticator app, Uber, or a way to view hiking trails. They turned to these phones to reduce the time spent staring at a smartphone screen and cut the anxiety driven by the modern attention economy from their lives, but turns out we still need apps .

“I cannot tell you how many people come back to us saying that, ‘Hey, if only you had this thing for QR code scanning; if only you had this localized app,’ that they'd be able to use the Light Phone more often," Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Light Phone, tells WIRED. “We're a smaller team, we're not Apple. We don't have app stores with millions of apps.”

But now the Brooklyn company is taking a step to close that gap. Light Phone is launching a developer program in May for LightOS, the operating system powering its new Light Phone III .…