Paper Phone

Special Projects - Experiments

About this app

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

Paper Phone helps you have a little break away from your digital world by printing a personal booklet of the key information you’ll need that day.

An app lets you choose what to include such as favourite contacts, maps and meetings and then prints them directly to a sheet of paper.

Customisable “paper apps” like recipes, phrasebooks and notepads let you get things done or unwind in a more focussed way.

We hope this little experiment can help you try a digital detox from technology and help you focus on the things that matter the most.

Paper Phone is an experimental open source Android app which is available to try right now. All of the code is available on Github for people to play with and hopefully adapt and evolve!

Find out more on our site: http://specialprojects.studio/project/paper-phone

Find out more on Experiments with Google: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/paper-phone

Ratings and reviews

This app has a lot of potential. I'm not sure if this is just a proof of concept and they're giving away the idea to another dev, but in its current state, it's not that good. I will support it, however, because I feel like it could be really amazing fully fleshed out. Maybe a paper app store, an option for custom pages (shrink and drag pages onto one to fit more info), and the ability to put more than one of certain pages. There are also numerous glitches. The potential makes up for it though.

The paper apps are the only items that appear on the paper. Even the name field doesn't appear. Maps just show a black polygon that takes up most of the second page. All the other apps like tasks and contacts so not appear. I was really excited to use this app based on the video, but disheartening to see that it can't print to PDF. The overall app typography is elegant, I'm suspecting that the PDF function is the cause.

Wonderful concept, but two issues: weather and calendar. Despite definitely having events in my calendar, the app says I have none and therefore doesn't show them. Also, it doesn't show the weather. Aside from fixing those two things, I would suggest making it possible to have multiple paper apps if there is space on the "phone". It would also be very helpful if multiple language phrasebooks were available. That would be great for travelling when your phone isnt much use!

What's new

Bug fixing:
* Unsolvable sudoku app.
* Calendars not being displayed.
* Print buttons not showing.
* Some crashes when creating pdf / printing from phone.