Technologies
A small software company in Bergen. We make Android apps that finish their work on the phone itself — no account to create, no server waiting to be asked, nothing to lose if the signal drops.
The company
Bis AS is registered in Bergen and run by Bernt Idar Sleire. The work is Android software: designing it, drawing it, writing it, and publishing it on Google Play under the company's own name.
The guiding decision is a boring one, and it comes first rather than last. An app should be able to do the thing it promises with the aeroplane symbol on. That rules out accounts, sign-in screens, syncing, leaderboards and the quiet stream of usage data that usually pays for all of it. What is left is a smaller app, a shorter list of permissions, and a privacy policy that is mostly a list of things that do not happen.
If nothing leaves the handset, there is no database to breach, no retention schedule to argue about, and no third party to vouch for. Storage lives in the app's private folder, which other apps cannot read, and uninstalling takes it with it.
It also means the apps keep working years later, when a server would have quietly been switched off.
Published by Bis AS
A teaching app for the one-handed fingerspelling alphabet. Every letter is drawn live from a hand model rather than photographed, so the curl of each finger and the position of the thumb stay readable from any size of screen, with a plain sentence describing how to form it and an arrow for the letters that move.
You can browse the alphabet grid, mark letters as learned, type a word and watch it spelled out at a speed you set, work through a staged practice path, and take quizzes that keep your best score. The hand can be mirrored for either handedness, and the app runs in English and Norwegian. It works offline, has no account and shows no advertising.
Knuckle on Google PlayTwenty-six letters have to live somewhere in the space of shapes a hand can hold, and they have to be far enough apart that nobody mistakes one for another across a room. Below is a deliberately crude model of that space: four fingers that can each sit at a few levels of curl, a thumb with a few places to be, and — if you want to count it — the direction the palm faces. Two shapes count as confusable when a single finger moving one notch, or the thumb or palm changing once, turns one into the other. Everything on the panel is counted by walking the whole space, with one exception: the last figure is worked out from the expected number of collisions, and a forty-thousand-draw simulation of the default setting puts the true value at 16.7% against the panel's 17%.
Not on this panel: no letters, no handshapes, no alphabet. The model does not know what an A looks like, and nothing here will teach you to spell anything. It only counts corners in a space and measures how close they sit.
Said plainly
Fingerspelling is a way of writing letters in the air. It is genuinely useful — names, places, a word you have not learned a sign for — but it is a spelling system, not a signed language. Norsk tegnspråk has its own grammar, its own history and its own community, and none of that is in an alphabet grid.
Knuckle is a first step and says so. It will not make anyone an interpreter, and it is not an accessibility service: where accuracy matters — a doctor, a courtroom, an emergency — the right answer is a qualified interpreter, not an app. Learning properly happens with deaf teachers and deaf people, and we would rather point at that than pretend otherwise.
Bis AS
Amalie Skrams vei 38, 5036 Bergen, Norway
Responsible: Bernt Idar Sleire
Du kan gjerne skrive på norsk.
© 2026 Bis AS · Bergen