Red OS
Developing our mobile operating system has been a significant challenge in the creation of Red Phone. We’ve crafted a beautifully designed E Ink mobile OS and made it open-source, fulfilling our users’ desire for quality and transparency.
Key features
The design and usability of Red Phone are carefully crafted to offer both beauty and practicality.
Tailored exclusively for Red Phone, our operating system ensures a seamless user experience that matches the device's unique design and functionalities.
Desktop app
Open Source
Red Phone prioritizes security and privacy, ensuring that your data remains safe and confidential at all times.
Red Phone is optimized to fully utilize the capabilities of the E Ink display, providing an enhanced and comfortable viewing experience.
Determining the core functionalities
Crafting a minimalist design for effortless living proved to be quite the challenge with Red Phone. Simplifying the design while maintaining functionality required extensive effort and meticulous attention to detail. It took us approximately 18 months of dedicated work and involved exploring over 40 different design proposals. But hey, maybe we went a bit overboard. What can we say? We’re perfectionists at heart.
Categorizing features
All teams participated in this process. We compiled a list of overall functionalities that Red Phone should incorporate, then subdivided them into specific applications and tools.
Selected Features
Home Screen
Calls
Phonebook
Messaging
Settings
Music Player
Alarm Clock
Calendar
Meditation Timer
Tools
Onboarding
Mapping out user flows
For each application, we prepared individual diagrams illustrating the functionalities, connections between them, and the possible user paths.
We meticulously explored various interface designs to find the perfect balance between functionality and simplicity.
The design team at Red Phone needed to prepare a visual representation of all the possible actions and a screen for every step that a user would take. This was a long and complicated process that took into account great usability, technical requirements and our love for beautiful design. Usability testing was also a big part of the design process as we wanted to get feedback as soon as pos
Designing for E Ink screen
We tested the E Ink screen and defined the detailed guidelines for further design decisions that would be optimized for this technology. We also wanted the user interface to be intuitive, readable and understandable regardless of the action performed.
Our designers were looking for the elements such as the thickness of the lines, sizes of the fonts, or spacing. While testing different styles, using several shades of gray, adding and removing elements, we’ve come to the conclusion that a clear, simple design, using mostly black ink, was the best answer.
We set our expectations high and we now have over 200 screens that meet all of our requirements.
Crafted for the device
RedOS has been designed to be the best performing, E Ink-optimized operating system that fits Red OS perfectly. Building an operating system optimized for a specific device gave us full control over the hardware and enabled getting the best out of its technical specs.
Addressing technical requirements
Every little detail needs to be addressed. We worked on several elements in-house such as: HAL – the Hardware Abstraction Layer between the hardware and the OS, the bootloader, the role of which is to configure the hardware to a level that allows the operating system to boot, a database for storing contact information and messages and a system manager that restores the system after switching on the phone, monitors the system status or performs the initial start-up etc.
Crossing hurdles
Developing the services, particularly integrating the GSM module, presented significant challenges. Our aim was to create an operating system that seamlessly integrates with the device, prioritizing simplicity, ease of maintenance, and optimal performance.
E Ink display
Optimizing Red Phone for the E Ink display was a priority during development. We focused on ensuring that all operations were tailored to work seamlessly with the unique characteristics of E Ink technology, such as its low power consumption and excellent readability.
Audio system
When working on the audio system, it was important not only to choose the right components, but also to implement an audio service. This way the Harman speaker will play your favorite tunes in MP3, WAV and FLAC formats!
Red Phone's operating system, RedOS, is also open source, reflecting our commitment to transparency and community-driven development.
Red Phone embraces the principles of open source, ensuring transparency, quality, and collaboration. We’re committed to providing a fully open operating system and invite you to join the RedOS open source community!
Open-sourcing Red Phone aligns perfectly with our “You’re happy – I’m Happy” philosophy. By making our minimalistic yet powerful operating system open source, we empower our community to explore, tinker, and innovate, whether by adding new features or customizing Red Phone to suit their unique requirements.
Absolutely, Open Source fosters quality by allowing for collaborative scrutiny and improvement of the codebase. With more developers contributing to bug fixes and security enhancements, Red Phone can maintain its reliability and security over the long term, ensuring that it continues to serve users effectively for years to come.