The flashlight became part of the phone in June 2010, when Apple launched the iPhone 4 with an LED on the rear camera. Before that, a flashlight on the iPhone was a third party app that used only the white screen (no dedicated hardware). With the LED, the iPhone got a real flashlight, and three physical objects started to disappear from the house. The bedside flashlight, the match or lighter to light a candle in a blackout, and the plastic keychain flashlight that fit in the car glove compartment. The iPhone replaced all three, and the user accepted the substitution without ceremony.
In 2013, with iOS 7, Apple added a flashlight shortcut to Control Center. That is when use exploded. Before, to turn on the flashlight you had to open a dedicated app. After, it was a swipe up from the bottom of the screen. On iPhone X and later, the shortcut became a fixed button on the Lock Screen. On iPhone with Action Button (iPhone 15 Pro onward), it became an action you could assign to the side button. Each iteration made the flashlight more accessible, more used, and harder to imagine living without.
But the flashlight in fiction carries a symbolic weight that predates the iPhone by decades. In Twin Peaks, the David Lynch series from 1990, investigator Dale Cooper’s flashlight is central to the aesthetic. There is a shot where he enters the forest with the flashlight on, and the yellow light cutting through the fog becomes a sign that something is about to happen. In Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers series from 2016, sheriff Hopper carries a huge Maglite on his belt, and whenever it turns on it is because the character is entering a place where something dangerous might be. The flashlight in fiction almost never appears in calm situations. It appears when someone is alone in a place they should not be.
In literature, Stephen King uses the flashlight recurrently in horror novels. In It, the Losers Club kids descend into Derry’s sewers with flashlights, and each lit flashlight marks a moment of tension. In The Mist, a flashlight pointed out of the supermarket becomes a source of information about what might be on the other side of the fog. In Pet Sematary, the protagonist’s flashlight crosses a cemetery at night, and when the light starts to fail, the reader already knows something is going to go wrong. The flashlight in narrative works as an extension of consciousness. The light is what the character knows, the dark is what they do not yet know. When the flashlight dims or fails, so does the character’s consciousness.
The phone flashlight inherited that sign. When someone opens the iPhone flashlight, they are in one of the same narrative categories. Investigation (looking for a key on the floor), unease (crossing a room at night), salvation (sudden blackout), search (missing cat). But the ritual was lost. Hopper’s Maglite has weight in the hand, has a mechanical click, has a focusable beam. The iPhone flashlight has a swipe. It is more convenient, more always available, infinitely lighter. But it lost the gesture.
Lanterna BLA is an attempt to give back some ceremony. Not in the sense of adding friction (the app opens fast, that is exactly the point), but in the sense of treating the act of turning on a flashlight as a decision, not a reflex. The six curated presets ask you to choose the scenario before turning on. Late-night bathroom is not the same light as Dark room. Looking for something is not the same light as SOS. The choice takes a second, but the second is editorial. It gives back, in app form, a little of the narrative weight the flashlight always had.
This positioning is consistent with what BLA does across the rest of the catalog. Sudoku BLA is a Sudoku app that asks you to play Sudoku, without pushing other things. Notas BLA is a notes app that turns text into an Instagram carousel in one tap, without ornament. Lanterna BLA is a flashlight app that turns on the light that fits the scene. Each product does one thing, and does it with more editorial weight than the utility would have required. It is the studio thesis, applied to the simplest possible digital object, a flashlight.
Next time you open the app, in the small hours that come, you will be using the object that replaced three others (the bedside flashlight, the match, the keychain flashlight), but carrying a cinematic symbol that goes back to Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, Stephen King. It turns on fast. It does not wake anyone up. And it is part of a narrative tradition in which the flashlight has always been what separates what is known from what is not yet known.
