The First Public Beta
is Out.
PresenceOS is now open to anyone who wants to try it. It's early, and it will show โ but everything on this page is running code, not a pitch deck.
Presence Companion, the pairing app, is available now for Android. I build and ship the updates myself, and every bug report lands in my inbox rather than a ticket queue. What beta testers hit this month decides what I fix next month.
A phone
without
the noise.
Get in touch and shape where this goes.
It's early enough that one email can change the roadmap.
PresenceOS keeps the essentials โ calls, messages, navigation, music, camera โ and permanently leaves out the mechanisms that drive digital addiction. The phone still does everything a phone should. It just stops there.
What I kept.
What I removed.
Intentional Browsing
Social media logins are blocked at the system level, not by willpower โ and "blocked" is really the wrong word, because the login path was never built in the first place. The PresenceOS browser redirects those attempts and surfaces something worth reading instead: Wikipedia, weather, news, DuckDuckGo. A small, curated surface with far less to go wrong.
Instagram and TikTok aren't filtered out; the architecture makes them structurally unavailable. The one exception is deliberate: a guardian (the optional parent mode) can remotely grant access to a virtual iOS or Android device, on a schedule and with limits the guardian sets. That approval is the only route to a conventional social network on PresenceOS.
Guardian Relay
A safety net that doesn't watch you all day. There is no always-on tracking or background monitoring; Guardian Relay sends event-based alerts at the moment you need help, and stays quiet the rest of the time. Safety shouldn't have to cost your privacy, so I didn't build it that way.
You can add up to 3 trusted NFC-paired contacts as guardians. Everything is consent-based and the logic runs on the device, not in a cloud profile.
Built-In Encrypted Settings
Auto-Lock, Screen PIN, NFC device pairing, and a private Presence Server for messaging and calls โ all configured on the device itself. USB debugging is off by default, and your data stays where you put it.
presenceOS v1.0.0 ยท be here now
No usage tracking.
No background data.
PresenceOS gathers no telemetry and has nothing to phone home to โ the code paths for analytics SDKs and behavioural profiling were never built in. A side effect of all that missing background chatter is noticeably longer battery life, and hardware that performs better for its price. The phone answers to whoever holds it, not to an advertiser's engagement target.
NFC Contacts Only
Contacts are added face-to-face, by tapping devices together, with both people agreeing. That single rule removes strangers, follower counts, discovery feeds and public profiles in one go. For everything else there's a built-in white and yellow pages, and a guardian can approve good old-fashioned phone numbers.
Backup and restore
with no cloud account, email, phone number or 2FA
You pick trusted contacts and an encrypted portion of your data is stored on their devices. They can't read it; you can restore from it. The more trusted contacts you add, the more you can back up.
Guardian-Controlled Social Access
Instead of trusting a platform's moderation team with your child's social media access, a PresenceOS guardian can enable or disable it at the system level, on the fly. The rest of the time it's just a phone โ and one-to-one messaging with face-to-face paired contacts keeps working regardless.
Guardian Relay
How you use Guardian Relay is up to you. For some households it replaces the grim add-on parental control market entirely. For others it just solves forgotten PINs: with approval from two or more companions, a device can be unlocked remotely, no support line involved.
Music Without the Machine
PresenceOS Waves plays your local files and works as a plain frontend for Spotify, with the recommendation rabbit holes left out. The queue contains what you put in it. That's the whole feature, and it's surprisingly hard to find elsewhere.
Your cloud.
Not theirs.
Your backups don't sit in a warehouse across the world.
They live, encrypted, with the people you trust.
How much cloud storage do you want?
myCloud is a distributed, peer-to-peer backup system. Your data is encrypted, split into shards, and stored across your trusted companions' devices โ there is no subscription to pay and no corporate datacentre in the loop.
Storage scales with your real-world trust network rather than your credit card. Each companion you add increases both your capacity and your redundancy, and none of it costs anything, because your friends' spare storage was already free.
Zero-knowledge by construction
Companions store encrypted shards they cannot read. Only you hold the keys, derived from your PIN and device identity. If a companion loses their device, you restore from the others.
"The backup layer is
your trust network."
For scale: Apple charges ยฃ2.99/month for 200GB. myCloud's capacity is bounded only by how many people will vouch for you.
Your phone.
Your palette.
Most OSes give you a wallpaper picker. PresenceOS has a full theme engine:
every surface, tone and accent is yours to change, and you can share the result if you like it.
by presenceOS
by @maren
by @rowan
by @huxley
by @suki
your own
No data about you is shared โ only colours and fonts.
Build in seconds
Pick an accent, a background, a text tone. Tap a font. That's it. The system applies your choices everywhere โ launcher, lock screen, system UI.
Share if you want
Flip one toggle and your theme lands in the community gallery. There's no account or email involved; it's tied only to your device identity, which keeps it anonymous by design.
Always yours
Unpublish at any time. Themes carry no metadata, location or usage stats back to me โ the data simply isn't sent, so there is no way for me to see who made what.
Not a concept.
A running device.
Every screen below is a real screenshot pulled straight off a live PresenceOS handset, hostname and all. There are no agency renders or Figma mockups on this page because I don't have any. What you see is what ships.
Device shown: POS-4BLIMYGA โ an in-development PresenceOS unit on my bench.
No accounts.
No passwords.
No 2FA.
Which turns out to be more secure, not less.
PresenceOS removes the weakest link in modern security: accounts tied to emails, phone numbers and passwords. A password that was never created can't leak, and there's no login page to phish or recovery email to hijack.
Your identity lives on your device, and recovery runs through the companions you've paired with in person. That's the entire model.
Band-aids on
a broken model.
Modern smartphones are engineered to maximise engagement, not wellbeing. The average person unlocks their phone 96 times per day. Children and teenagers face algorithmic content loops designed by teams of engineers whose sole objective is time-on-platform.
Existing solutions โ parental control apps, screen-time features, digital detox programmes โ sit on top of systems designed to undermine them. They are band-aids on a broken model.
PresenceOS is a purpose-built alternative rather than a filter bolted onto Android or iOS. I started from what a phone should do, and just as importantly, from what it should refuse to do.
What if your phone was on your side?โ PresenceOS, Pilot Programme 2027
No major player is building this. De-Googled Android projects exist, but they assume technical expertise most families don't have and shouldn't need. That's the gap PresenceOS sits in.
Pilot Programme
Onboarding
I'm Paul, the founder, and I'm planning the initial rollout around a small number of intentional households โ a controlled pilot to pressure-test real-world use, with several families already showing interest. PresenceOS is an entire ecosystem, not a device-management add-on, and I need real families using it daily to find what I can't find on my own bench.
What pilot households get
- โA pre-configured PresenceOS device โ yours to keep after the real-world beta run
- โA private contact set up for your household, so the network feels lived-in from day one
- โA guided onboarding session with me
- โA monthly feedback loop with me directly โ updates are shaped by what your household actually hits
- โA choice of two compatible mid-range hardware options; my main conversation with the manufacturer is build quality
Straight answers.
Is this anti-technology?
No. PresenceOS provides everything a phone should โ calls, messages, navigation, music, camera, browsing. What it removes are the mechanisms designed to exploit you: recommendation engines, behavioural profiling, social media loops. The goal is intentional technology, not absent technology.
Can my child browse the open internet?
Yes, with a reduced vulnerability surface. General browsing works; social media login pages are blocked at the system level. I provide curated quick links โ Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, news, weather โ as a starting point. The idea is to remove the primary vectors of harm and trust families to guide the rest.
Who is this for?
Three groups keep turning up in my inbox: families who want real device safety without giving up a useful phone; adults who are done being tracked by their own handset; and elderly users who just want a calm, simple interface. The pilot is structured around family households.
How do contacts work?
Contacts are added by physically tapping two PresenceOS devices together via NFC โ encrypted identity keys exchanged in person, and both parties must agree. There is no username search and no follower requests, so strangers have no way in. Your contact list is the people you have physically chosen to connect with.
How does myCloud work without a server?
myCloud uses a distributed backup model. Your data is encrypted on your device, split into shards, and distributed across your NFC-paired companions. Companions store encrypted blobs they cannot read. You can restore from any 2 of 3 companions. No server holds a readable copy of your data; the PresenceOS signal server only relays encrypted packets it cannot open.
What happens when the pilot ends?
The device is yours to keep. Pilot families are founding partners โ you've shaped the product and carry it forward. Post-pilot subscription terms will be established collaboratively with pilot families during the programme.
Apply for the
Family Pilot.
Five founding families, starting Q1 2027, with direct access to me throughout. Your feedback becomes the product roadmap.
I read every application personally and reply within a few days.