Envelope

Special Projects - Experiments

About this app

Many people feel that they spend too much time on their phones and struggle to find a balance with technology.

Envelope is an app which temporarily transform your phone into a simpler, calmer device, helping you take a break away from your digital world.
Once you've printed and folded our special pdf into an envelope it will turn your phone into a very basic device which can only make and receive calls helping you focus on what’s in front of you.

Printed buttons which subtly light up allow you to dial and take photographs, creating a calm but magical “Envelope User Interface”.

Amazingly, touch screens still work through a layer of paper (you can try it right now!) because they sense the capacitance of your finger which is only slightly affected by the envelope. Existing functions such as fingerprint locking still function, and the user interface of the app is optimised for OLED displays, which means it won’t drain your battery if it’s on all day long.

The app is open source and all code is available on Github

https://github.com/specialprojects-experiments/envelope

We currently only support the Google Pixel 3a

Ratings and reviews

Good only in theory. In practice, it had too many awkward limitations. -It's hard to tell when your phone is unlocked. -Can't use with your regular case. -If something goes wrong, you still get error messages on the screen, you just can't see them. -It uses speakerphone, so no privacy. If there's a way to switch this, I can't find it. I lasted 6 minutes, and one phone call, and then I ripped it off. An app that dumbs down the phone would be better.

Super fun app. Need real determination to be able to use this for more than a couple of hours. But really keeps you off the phone. Very creative. Should give another cutout in the envelope to show screen where we can see who we are calling and who is calling us. Also, please include a backspace. What to do when you press a wrong number?

Love this, but... The buttons on the printout are a bit too low. I had to hand write them on. It looks like the available print out is not the same print out that the people are using in the video.

What's new

Initial release