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The money is saved by the number they dial, not by software running on your phone. One QR scan installs the number as an eSIM, and after that every call lands in your phone’s own dialler — nothing to open, sign into, update or keep connected.
Calls from prison to a landline cost 2.48p a minute on weekdays against 5.50p to a mobile — £0.74 for half an hour instead of £1.65, so the same capped money buys about 2.1× the talk. That difference is in the tariff. No software can add to it and none is needed to get it.
What you need
This is a comparison of approaches, not of named companies — what an app-based service needs is a property of the architecture, and any particular provider’s current terms are theirs to state.
Why it matters
The people most likely to be holding this together are often the least at home in an app store — a grandparent keeping a family in touch, a household with no broadband, an address where the signal only works by the window.
The Ministry of Justice found the same thing about video calls: they only ever helped families who already had the technology and the confidence to use it, and the digital divide is why they never replaced visits for the people who most needed them. Anything that requires a device requires having the device.
A number that rings in the phone’s own dialler asks nothing new of the person answering it.
The saving itself needs no technology at all: calls from prison to any UK landline are charged at less than half the mobile rate — 2.48p a minute against 5.50p on weekdays — so a landline at home already gets it. RingYard puts that landline number on your mobile instead, and that one step does need a phone that takes an eSIM — most phones from the last six years. What it never needs is an app, an account or wifi calling.
Yes. Setting up is one QR scan, once — a couple of minutes wherever you have signal or wifi. After that every call arrives the same way any other call to your phone arrives, so day to day it needs no broadband, no wifi and no data allowance.
Pay-as-you-go, yes — receiving calls on your RingYard number costs you nothing, and how you pay for your own line makes no difference. A basic non-smart handset, honestly, no: the number installs as an eSIM, so the phone has to support one. Most smartphones from the last six years do — and once it's in, there is no app, no account and nothing that needs updating.
No. The landline number installs alongside your own, as a second line in the same phone. Yours stays exactly as it is; theirs is the one you pass on for the phone list.
Nothing changes about your signal — but a normal voice call is far more tolerant of a weak signal than an app call over data, which is the usual reason app-based calls break up or drop.
The eSIM installs an ordinary UK landline on the phone you already have. They add it to their list like any other number.