One tap, one call
For someone who can no longer manage a regular phone: CallByFace turns an Android into a locked calling screen with up to six faces. You tap a photo and the call starts. There are no menus to get lost in and no unnecessary steps to get confused by.
Sara
calling…
Sara
calling…
This is not an app you download. You buy a licence — one QR code that installs and locks CallByFace onto an Android phone.
CallByFace turns an ordinary Android phone into a locked screen with six large photos. Tap a face and the call goes through — no home screen, no apps, no settings.
Why it exists
After the brain haemorrhage, the phone was no longer usable for him.
He immediately recognised his children in photos. But the contact list, call log, and small buttons meant nothing to him. Everything relied on remembering the next step. He could no longer do that.
He could neither call anyone himself nor answer when someone called.
To call, he had to find the right name in a long contact list. To answer, he had to swipe in the right direction before it stopped ringing. None of that worked. Often he was left holding the phone after the call had already gone to voicemail.
Swiping to answer was impossible.
The haemorrhage had taken the fine motor skills in his right hand. Dragging a finger across the screen in a few seconds while holding the phone still was beyond him.
A senior phone didn't solve the problem.
We bought a simpler phone for seniors. It had fewer menus, but still menus – and the answer button was not large enough to hit correctly. After two weeks, it lay unused in a drawer.
So we built something else: the whole screen is the button.
A locked calling screen that makes the most important things simple: calling and answering. Up to six familiar faces are shown on the screen. He taps one of them, and the call starts. When someone calls, that person's face is shown over the entire screen. To answer, just tap anywhere on the image. No swiping, no small buttons, less time pressure.
CallByFace has been used every day for four years. Since then, around ten other families have tried it in their daily lives — and their experience was the same. Now we are making it available to everyone.
How we got here
2022 — First version
Built for a family member after his brain haemorrhage, so he could call and answer again. No product and no plan — just a phone that had to work.
2025–2026 — Test group
Ten other families used it in daily life. Different challenges, different phones. What they told us shaped the admin menu, the emergency button and the setup.
2026 — Public release
The same calling screen that has sat on a kitchen table for four years, now as a licence anyone can order.
Feedback from the test group
Before the launch, we let around ten households use CallByFace in their daily lives, with the support of their relatives. Different challenges, different phones — but the feedback pointed the same way. Below is that feedback, anonymised and summarised.
I called every evening and never got an answer. He could hear it ringing, but never managed to do the right thing in time. Now he almost always answers — he just taps the face.
We had tried two other solutions. Both were supposed to be simple, but there were still settings, logins and notifications popping up. This is the first thing that really only does one thing.
We looked at care phones first. It got expensive every month for something that would not be usable anyway. Here the phone already in a drawer was enough.
We bought a simpler senior phone last year. It is still in the drawer. This one has been out on the living room table since day one.
We used to have to call through the staff. Now she calls herself, in the middle of the day, for no reason at all. That is what had been missing most.
I was sceptical. He has aphasia and I thought another screen would just be another failure. After a week I stopped thinking about it — he simply uses it.
The feedback comes from relatives in our test group and is published anonymised. No names, towns, ages or other details that identify an individual. The wording is summarised and lightly edited for readability — the meaning is unchanged.
Got a question? Ask it openly in the forum — earlier questions and answers stay there to read.Go to the forum
FOR RELATIVES — BEFORE YOU ORDER
Most people should have an ordinary smartphone with texting, camera, banking and internet. CallByFace does not replace this — it is what you turn to once other solutions become too difficult.
If the person can still use their phone, they should keep using it. CallByFace is for someone who otherwise cannot call at all.
Not just a feeling
CallByFace was built in a living room, not a lab. But when we read the research afterwards it said the same thing: large targets and faces are measurably easier for a hand and a memory that have been affected.
~80%
of people who have had a stroke experience impaired hand function
Swipes and small buttons are not a detail — they are the barrier itself.
Healthcare (MDPI) 2022 — Upper Limb Motor Impairment in StrokeSmall targets
produce measurably more misses
Controlled studies show touchscreen accuracy drops clearly with small targets for people with motor impairments, while large targets narrow the gap to people without impairment.
Chen et al., Applied Ergonomics 201248 dp
is the minimum recommended touch target
Android's own accessibility guidance sets 48 dp as the floor for a touch target. CallByFace uses roughly ten times that area per contact.
Android Accessibility — touch target sizeLarger than standard
is required for older adults
Research on smartphone interfaces for older adults lands on markedly larger touch targets and wider spacing than ordinary app icons. CallByFace uses six targets across a full screen.
Leitão & Silva — target sizes for older adults~1 in 3
develop aphasia after a stroke
Language can fail while face recognition remains. A screen built on photos instead of text and names requires no language at all.
Engelter et al., Stroke 2006 — epidemiology of aphasia after strokeFaces
outlast names and numbers
Recognising the face of someone close often seems to remain when names, numbers and menu logic do not. We have not found a controlled study measuring exactly this — it is what we saw in our test group, and the basis for calling by photo instead of text.
Our own observation in the test group, not a published study
CallByFace is not a simplified menu. It is a screen built around what an affected hand can actually do.
Market study · senior phones from other manufacturers
These ratings are for other manufacturers' senior phones, not CallByFace. We aggregated 3,323 public customer ratings in Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States. 45 percent gave something other than full marks, and almost one in five gave 1 or 2 out of 5. They rarely write about price or battery life — it is about menus that are still there, answering windows that are too short, and phones that eventually stopped being used.
Nothing to learn. She sees the face, taps it, and the call goes through.
Same phone, same plan. A different home screen.
Regular Android
Thirty-two icons, four menu layers, notifications that move.
CallByFace
Six people. One tap. No way out of the screen.
No new phone needed
You buy a licence, not a phone. Any Android from 2019 or later that sits unused at home will likely do just fine — it becomes something entirely different once CallByFace locks the screen.
And one more phone that does not become electronic waste.
Six contacts in a large grid with photo and name. No contact list, no keypad, no search field.
The face fills the whole screen, and you answer by tapping anywhere on the photo. A red area at the bottom ends the call. No swipe, no small button.
A dedicated bar that is always visible and calls the same preset number. It is not an alarm service — in an emergency, use your local emergency number.
The phone runs in locked mode: it starts straight into CallByFace and the user cannot accidentally leave the screen. An ordinary app can be switched out of or uninstalled — this one cannot. Home button, app switcher and settings open only for a family member through the hidden admin mode, and that is also who can lift the lock.
The deciding question is not how many buttons there are. It is: can the user end up outside the interface? The columns are product categories, not individual products or manufacturers, and each row describes what the category typically does.
An Android phone you have at home or a used one is plenty.
The code we send installs CallByFace and puts the phone into locked mode.
Photo, name and number. Done. The phone can be handed over.
Same licence, same price — different ways to get started.
Registered Swedish seller
CallByFace is sold by Visera AB, company reg. no. 556682-5211, in Linköping, Sweden.
90-day money-back
If it does not work as intended you get your money back, whatever the reason.
Support in an open forum
Questions and answers stay public on this site — you can read them before you order.
Disputes handled by ARN
If we cannot agree, you can turn to the Swedish National Board for Consumer Disputes. Swedish law applies.
Pay online and the QR code and instructions are emailed right after. No lock-in, no subscription on the phone.
Order CallByFace“I called every evening and never got an answer. He could hear it ringing, but never managed to do the right thing in time. Now he almost always answers — he just taps the face.”