indie Phone

Indie Phone: industrial design tease

Deeply empowering

Vote now — Net Awards Nominee

Indie Phone shortlisted at The Net Awards

Thank you all for your support — we did it! We have been shortlisted for Game Changer of the Year at The Net Awards.

Indie founder Aral Balkan is also shortlisted in Entrepreneur of the Year for Indie and Conference Talk of the Year for his keynote on Digital Feudalism and How to Avoid It.

tech.eu logo

The 50 most exciting lean hardware startups in Europe

Indie Phone is featured in Tech.eu as one of the 50 of the most exciting lean hardware startups in Europe. See the full list here.

Gigaom logo

Designing for freedom: Meet the people putting user experience at the heart of online privacy

“Balkan wants Indie Phone to compete head-on with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus: consumer devices that are all about the integration of hardware with software and services … ‘If we are to compete with closed silos and solutions, we have to compete on user experience.’”

Read the full article on Gigaom.

Fastcompany logo

Can This Alternative Smartphone Deliver Real Privacy to the Masses?

“Indie Phone, with an original operating system and individual servers for each user, aims to sell mobile hardware that protects and empowers the masses, but is just as beautiful and useable as our current, compromised devices.”

Read the full article on Fast Company.

Design thinking meets open source in a phone like no other.

We’re creating the world’s first experience-driven open phone. It’s time to make open source accessible to all and to empower everyone — not just enthusiasts — to take charge of their own data.

indie OS

What’s an OS? Why should you care? Our thoughts exactly.

Creating a beautiful, seamless experience makes it necessary for us to control all aspects of the experience. This is why we are making our own operating system with its own culture. We are going to work very hard on Indie OS to make it as invisible as possible. Because when something just works, you can simply forget about it.

indie Cloud

Think of it as your own personal iCloud and Facebook.

It’s simply not enough to create an open phone or an operating system. It just doesn’t solve the problem of empowering you to own your own data. If we just made an OS or a phone, we would simply be encouraging you to use the services of closed silos. Instead, we are building our own core services. So you have the apps you need. Apps that you own. Running on a cloud that you own. And, like the OS, you don’t have to worry about it unless you absolutely want to.

Why?

Our lives are just a string of experiences. Experiences with people and experiences with things. And the quality of those experiences determine the quality of our lives.

Great experiences can improve the quality of our lives and empower us. The best ones even manage to delight us.

And yet, experiences can also be superficial.

Companies like Google and Facebook tempt us with seamless and beautiful experiences that are free yet Disney-esque in nature. They do not truly empower us. How can they, when we do not own the information we create, store, and share with them? We are not their customer but rather the product that they sell to their real customers. We are the quarries that they mine. Our data, the raw materials for the valuable profiles of us that they sell to their real customers and share with governments.

Free is an enticing promise, but it is, ultimately, a lie. The true cost of free is our privacy, and subsequently, our civil liberties. And we believe that that is too high a price to pay.

There are, of course, open alternatives to the closed silos and free services. There are alternatives where free means liberty, not zero monetary cost. Unfortunately, they require a degree in Computer Science to use. Although they are open, they are not accessible to everyone.

It is time for an alternative. An alternative that empowers you with a beautiful experience but is not superficial. An alternative that you truly own. An alternative that just happens to be open.

A beautiful experience that is deeply empowering.

That alternative is Indie Phone.

Currently bootstrapping.

Crowdfunding in 2014.

Ships 2016.

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