FOR THE BUYER
Give her a phone she understands without learning.
If your mum has an Android and every Sunday she asks you the same things (how to see the photos, where the green button is, what that strange screen is that just appeared) the problem is not her. The screen was built for someone else.
WHY IT HELPS: an interface built for us, not for her.
Modern Android is built for people who live on their phone. Notifications at all hours. Gestures. Menus that rearrange themselves. The Play Store offering her games. For a 78-year-old with tired eyes and a slightly slower memory, that is constant noise.
You know the script. She rings at twenty to five, while you are in a meeting: "WhatsApp isn't working". Half past six: "an icon has moved". Saturday morning: "a weird screen appeared and I don't know what I touched". Sometimes you ring her back that afternoon. Sometimes you don't. You feel guilty when two days go by without speaking. Quiles does not fix that. What it does is remove this specific script.
Your mum does not want to explore features. She wants to ring you when she feels like it and the grandkids' photos to be exactly where they were yesterday.
Same phone, new home screen.
Quiles Mayor replaces the Android home screen with one built for her. You do not change the device. You do not throw anything away. You do not migrate contacts to a £200 specialised phone. You install Mayor on the Android she already has.
Her people, in fixed positions
The home screen is her contacts. Large photo, name underneath, one tap to ring. You and your sister always in the same tiles. Muscle memory settles in two weeks and she stops asking where anyone is.
No visible Play Store, no app notifications
The app drawer is hidden. Marketing messages, casual game alerts and "offers" disappear. She only sees messages from people who wrote to her directly.
Large text, high contrast, legible everywhere
Default body text at 22 px, scalable to 30. Buttons 56 px tall. WCAG AAA contrast across every screen. This is not an accessibility mode hidden in a settings menu. It is the only screen there is.
Optional read-aloud
Any screen can be read out loud with one tap. Useful for tired eyes, or for days when reading on a screen makes her anxious.
Setup: a Sunday afternoon, twenty minutes.
You buy the licence at quiles.app/en/elder and get an email with the install link. You drive to your mum's, borrow her phone for a moment while the kettle boils, install Mayor, add her contacts with photos, and hand it back. That is it.
No account to create, no cloud sync to maintain, no parental app watching her from your phone. You configure once. It stays that way until you decide otherwise.
WHAT IT DOES / WHAT IT DOES NOT: read this before buying.
Quiles Mayor works well for mild cognitive decline: occasional forgetfulness, confusion with new interfaces, anxiety around modern technology. It is for parents who are still independent but no longer want to fight with their phone.
It is not for advanced dementia. If your dad no longer recognises faces, gets disoriented in his own house, or needs continuous supervision, an app will not fix that. He needs in-person care. Telling you this is more useful than charging you £30 for something that will not work in his case.
It also does not replace human contact. The simplest phone in the world does not make up for a weekly visit. Mayor makes calling trivial. The rest is still up to you.
Why not buy a Doro or Jitterbug?
Dedicated senior phones (Doro, Jitterbug, Emporia) cost £150 to £250, have large physical keys and their own simplified software. They work. But they have three real downsides.
First: they are new devices. Your mum has to learn a different address book, leave behind the photos she already had, get used to physical keys after ten years of touchscreens. The learning curve weighs more on a 78-year-old than the supposed benefit of simplification.
Second: the battery. After 2 or 3 years it holds half a charge. Replacing the battery on a Doro is not trivial, and by then it does not make economic sense to repair.
Third: the software almost never updates. Functions that break (messages arriving late, contacts going out of order) stay broken.
Quiles Mayor installs onto the Android your mum already has, or onto a £100 refurbished phone if hers is sluggish, and updates itself. When the physical phone dies, you move the licence to the next one.
Pricing: yearly subscription, 14-day free trial.
Quiles Mayor costs €59/year (~€4.92/month) with a 14-day free trial. It's a yearly subscription: it renews each year on the same day, you can cancel anytime, and there's no lock-in. We email you before every renewal. No premium tier and no surprise charges for add-on features — everything is included. If you'd rather not commit to a year, there's a monthly plan too, but yearly works out cheaper (~€4.92/month vs the monthly rate).