Not everyone has the ability to understand and properly use smartphones, even the simplest models. A young, Russian developer has come up with an open-sourced platform that can run on top of Android and can be used by the elderly, people who need bigger visuals, and those that have motor problems. BaldPhone basically will replace your device’s interface with something that is bigger, easily understandable and is very much user-friendly. Best of all, it is absolutely free and can be tweaked and added to since it’s open-sourced.
The platform has all the basic functions that a smartphone user would need, only it’s designed for those that may have difficulty understanding and using the current ones we have. It has a home launcher, a customizable interface where you can choose how to interact with your screen, contact and phone apps, alarms, photos and videos viewer, etc. It even has a voice assistant in case you’d rather talk than type.
Since it’s created mainly for the elderly, the platform has a special reminder for pills in case the user needs to keep track of their medication. You also get an SOS button which should be useful in case you’re in an emergency situation and cannot call 911 or do something involving a few more taps. Plus, it has video tutorials for even the simplest of things like setting up an alarm to guide people who are not digital natives.
It also has a built-in updater so your software will always be the latest version without having to rely on app-store services. It has three themes to choose from: Light, Dark, and Adaptive, which will automatically choose light or dark depending on the time of day. And since it’s open-source, you can contribute to it as the whole thing is up on Github. All of it is absolutely free but the developer is, of course, open to some financial support through Patreon.
You can download the BaldPhone platform from F-Droid for free. Your smartphone needs to be running on Android 5.0 or newer. Please note that this is not available on Google Play Store.
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