Okay, our next speaker is Peter from linmob.net and linuxmartphones.org and he's talking about
the Linux phone app ecosystem.
Please have a round of applause.
Hello everybody.
So I hope everybody can hear me and yeah, this is my first talk and I'm really glad
to be here.
It's amazing that this conference is running every year volunteer based and that we have
another room this year to have all these great mobile Linux talks.
Now we'll have one that's maybe less great but I don't know.
So I think I need to hold that.
So this is an important thing.
You can use those devices, Qualcomm SOCs or the little five and whatnot and you want
to touch on all of it but it does have no apps, right?
So in theory this could be so simple.
You just install Waderoid on your distribution, simple and then you install asteroid, free
software apps and then maybe you need some proprietary stuff so you can do that and you
have all the apps.
Well, you know, I've done that with Linux, it was in the past and so on and microg is
amazing and whatnot but there's always issues and especially with virtualized Android and
so yeah.
There are good approaches and worse but I think I would rather go with native if possible
so this talk is only about native apps, whatever that means.
But not so fast, let's have a brief agenda.
Who am I?
Some dumb puns maybe.
What's not in this talk?
I don't have a slide for that because why?
And then apps on Safe for Sure has absolutely a bunch of touch and the new contenders so
what I do with the links on apps.org or what others and I do with the links on apps.org
because I don't develop any apps as other people and I don't add all the apps.
Can't do it.
And then highlights we have, gaps and challenges and Q&A maybe.
So motivation.
We already heard of three major projects, realms maybe mentioned like with Safe for Sure has
and you want to touch and all these new Linux distributions that's born up that we'll get
into later and I think this is a small space in terms of market share but to solve that
it's heavily fragmented.
So maybe there's something to learn.
Maybe another platform project, whatever you call it, product does something different
and that's great and maybe others can learn from that.
And then I wanted to spend some time with you, want to touch and Safe for Sure has after
a while but yeah I don't know, broke happened so yeah that part is going to be rather thin.
So then I had some assumptions at first so surely stuff like email that's easy, document
protocols, well maybe quite complicated but it's there, metrics, it's there, XMPP, just
do it and then stuff that has free APIs also yeah you know people will do it and then everything
that has an API even if paid should also be doable.
So yeah, let's get into it.
So Safe for Sure has.
When, oh I forgot the introduction part, shit.
So yeah this is my website, it's lin.net that stands for linear mobster's network, no actually
not.
So this is a logo, you may know it from YouTube and this is the current homepage, weekly updates,
a lot of work and now how it started because I think that part matters a bit.
So it started in 2007 and even back then we had plenty of Linux mobile projects, community
and others coming over from the handheld age to the smartphone age, handhelds.org, linux.go.org,
I don't know if anybody was in those IRC rooms at the time if you are in your year, great.
That's real stamina, what would you call that?
So I somehow stayed around, well I left briefly because in 2011 we had like a major two things
killed by CEO, so what happened with Nokia and what happened at HP, new CEO and then
boom mobile linux, look promising, died, also open moco.
Now to get into this talk, while I was doing a blog and totally into the Aztec in 2020
with a pine cone and oh my god what can you do, this thing only lasts five hours but hey
I want to use it so is there a list of apps from this, forked it, eventually turned it
into this because the previous implementation would no longer work on those low Linux phones
and it's still pretty bad, I think there's an issue tracker on Framigate and we'll get
to that later maybe but yeah so improvements of Alka I say but there's a lot that has been
learned and I think it can be helpful so we skip that so say a fish, like we just said
Elop killed the Anain and Harmaton Nokia and from the ashes raised YOLLA and they introduced
the YOLLA phone into 2013 and it's quite modern so it's BTRFS well yeah who cares file systems,
Wayland system the 2013, Wayland really and then there's a going, troubled surely don't make any
more on devices you can buy a license bring you on Sony device and they've got something that's
quite interested for those that need those proprietary bits to close the gap that's Android
app support not a topic of this talk so what do they have so there are multiple interfaces to
get software so there's the YOLLA star requires the YOLLA account no for pay apps has no web
interface so I did not count those apps maybe there's an API or something we didn't look into it
but yeah it looks quite nice and that's not the only source of software that's well organized
there there's also open repost on that now that one is really old if you go on to open repost
on that you will see that it lists one app for the LibreM 5 or for POS but it also has many apps
for the N900 which I think many people still have fond memories of and the N9 and there's even
some development still for the N9 so people are still using that thing today yeah it has a
Storm in frontend for Safefish has also no for pay apps it like I said lists up for the projects
and it has approximately 1800 apps and counting listed for Safefish but I don't think that with
the transition from arm 32 to 64 bit and the long history of four major releases that Safefish
apps you will be as you will be able to use all of them now this is what it looks like a little
bit less entertaining than the YOLO Star but also I think quite fun and then there's a newest
contender of course because more options better and that's Chum it since recently has a web front
end it also has no for pay apps it has 170 apps listed for Safefish and it includes and this is
for me a total highlight because it's this cross project collaboration I'm talking about it includes
some Kyrgyz apps by packaging a modern version of Qt because Safefish uses silica for its widgets
and it's stuck on Qt 5.6 forgot to tell you that earlier I mean who wants to talk about those
sites that aren't so nice and shiny but people made it work and you can run like cast Angerfisher
web browser which is nice because sometimes you may want a Chromium web browser because the real
web browser in Safefish or as is Gekko based which is also really unique and there will be a
talk about that later on so yeah highlights I did a little impromptu poll on Masterdun I wanted
to do something better but these are the highlights of Safefish OS so if you're using Safefish OS
and you haven't installed those apps I mean what are you doing just take out your Safefish phone
and then install them and maybe enter your security code yeah and then you can do this nice
multitask gesturing thing I will not go into demoing apps on Safefish OS I did that for YouTube
and I failed miserably people were making fun of me doing that again so yeah there's a lot Safefish
OS connect by the way integrate with KDE connect so if that's not obvious and then we have even
had contract so if you were like me having a relative that was in deep danger that was something
to appreciate at the time I mean now no more tracking why would we so yeah then next one
just at Safefish now let's go for a bunch of touch it's about as old if not older envisioned in
2011 this is nice quarter on there so it was in 2011 that it was announced and it would Ubuntu
would support smartphones tablets smart TV smart screens smart watches head units whatnot
everything maybe peak Ubuntu I don't know and then they I left out the prepaid crowd
for everybody else about that one and then had the first commercial device in 2015 February 2015
so like nine years ago by now my man time flies and they'd used mirror which these days is a
way than compositor but then wasn't upstart because yeah and unit 8 their own convergent thing unity
hate is amazing it's now you know Mary thankfully because canonical eventually would drop that all
that great effort because didn't have market success so another death by CEO if you will but it was
picked up by the community and could be picked up by the community because it was completely open
source so maybe that's one of those lessons so only trust projects that are completely open
source because then it doesn't matter if they go under and yeah you be porters doing great
drop the latest release was just a few days ago and the store situation is also pretty simple
as the open store it has a web interface so you can browse it without having even to touch
device and get an idea of what would be available even as ratings so can look into is this actually
working and it has more apps for the older one than for the new one so really I think
that those numbers you know with 210 whether it's about 610 I think it's actually 217
215 by now but yeah who cares about the exact number that really should improve the open store
has one neat feature I wanted to put a screenshot of that into my slides but who has the time so
when you install an app on the open store it basically sometimes if that's specified next
you for donation to the developer and I think if I remember correctly it may do that later on
again and I know nagging nobody like likes to be necked me neither and nobody wants to feel
bad because they don't have the time to fill out the details and do that stuff that you need to
do that donation because it's also complicated because payment but I think that's a nice idea
because you know giving something back and not just feedback does not work for me fail I don't
know this is garbage you know maybe communicate friendly that might help and maybe donate if
there's a way to keep this going you know we need to do that and then of course other ways to install
apps so you can do you want to contain over 604 this was totally uninteresting for you know all
those new apps we get to later because well in 1604 you want to 604 not much was mobile
friendly in the GT cable they can type that and neither in KDE land really and then with 20 or 4
it's a little bit better but you need to bring your own environment variable variables and then
there's new development only work on some devices snaps are you can install snaps on you want to
touch now snaps are known to be controversial but on a system like you want to touch which is also
in a way immutable air quotes and was very early with that so that's another thing that's great I
think it's nice to have another option to distribute software more widely and if snaps what's been
added first got a sticker on my little tablet here that's just what I would have preferred but
it's good to have really nice and well you need to bring your own and worse to make it scale properly
but wouldn't be fun otherwise highlights you must know so if you do a poll on master then apparently
people favor message on clients it's weird and Weber a tool for web app creation generally you
want to touch has a bunch of web apps which is great they have a way to do those other projects
should do that too because it's maybe is relatively simple way to make a service seem
available from an app store because people don't think that there's web browser that they could
use then Deco great email client well might use some work to get GPG award but I mean come on
it's an email client didn't have that when it was on the canonical throne that was fun when I first
tried you want to touch it was like what the fuck because the only email client that shipped was a
Gmail client again whatever past memories and then you nav for navigation and then there are more
some of those really should be brought over just some highlights I think you can read those yourself
so fluffy flesh had flutters interesting because they did not ship GTK and flutter in that click
package as far as I could concern they made it a web app so they flutter can do web apps and then
they went that way so also interesting hack would like to see more of that and then there's an app
for scooter for scooters you know those urban mobility shit supporting two services really
great I don't know whether it works didn't try be friendly if you try and have bugs Tesla app
don't have a Tesla no idea Nostar nobody needs Nostar but they have a client and it works for me
because I try to go there with my blog and whatnot but and then of course it's body for a premium
client because like assumptions earlier it's body for premium IP I works good so and then gaps
briefly for this metrics apps maybe so yeah not not really happy with that situation it's
interesting the element adaptation is something like a hack some CSS hacks on top of element desktop
nice approach but of course something like that is prone to break it you basically patch the
more moving target how to do just ask all the Android custom ROMs and then XMPP of course and
desktop Firefox we want to touch that's one for the poll yeah that would be great now new contenders
and that's the area I'm competent about which why I spend so much time on other shit to not talk
about it too much so up top you see the UIs for or also mom shell I could have put another logo
there plasma mobile and then as a joke because I'm not going to talk about thermal apps sorry
as XMO it's it's awesome I use it on my pine phone pro and then distributions you know dang next
post macros mobian fedora there's a mobility stick then that fun icon anybody know what the
icon on the right is any hands yes no it's open mandrieva made made one image for the
pine phone but I had to put it here we are right now as some rolling of but you want to
mobile next OS nice to have that too and of course open zoos the lizards are here too so yeah
and then of course how did that get started it's all history 2017 maybe 2020 live in five pine
phone what's a project based on desktop distributions like we saw I've got two times
there being in that list and many eyes plasma mobile with kirgami for apps for with first
lipendi a widget library to make GTK apps more adaptive and then these days lip of
data for GTK for which really made us rain to go so that's more of a success than I would
have hoped for as a spectator on the sidelines really impressive and then the downsides well
no proper app store solution ish hands links for naps for dog org you know I was really hoping
that we wouldn't need that by now because you don't want to maintain a website that lists like
I don't know 500 maybe including games these days apps and has to you have to check those and
then does it still work oh no I don't know who has the time so these are all the fun UI
frameworks that I used in apps listed on Linux for network most of these don't really matter
and I already mentioned the ones that do really matter except maybe flutter because that's going
somewhere well but we will touch the later this is just as an overview so there are plenty apps
with Kirigami it's like hundred and forty naps listed so plus my mobile is going rather strong
there no side goes a little bit stronger up top with a lipendi I mean I could also call
the account GTK for and GTK 3 but some of those don't really super fit very well you know only
with foch scale to fit heck and whatnot if you've been in that arena you've seen that
rodeo it works and it's great to have it but it shouldn't be there so yeah the panty 66 lip
advisor 156 used to be more in the panty camp stuff is moving over which is I think good to see
I don't know why I've got one you bunch of components at there yeah I think it was
future five before it was an open store and then programming languages well I think everybody
here in here is more competent to judge this than me I can do a little bit Python and some CSS and
HTML and whatnot and barely do JavaScript but so it comes with the with the toolkits right
there are also some things that I did not know before I started this list I didn't know that there
were GTK apps made with C++ I always assumed that was all cute but yeah you learn so looking at the
interfaces you can use to browse software here's one that's really nice these days it's no software
see that fun little thing there that says adaptive yeah that's great that's metadata if that were
everywhere I could stop working on Linux phone apps boy would I love that so but we're not there yet
so yeah it's tough so can show that and then there's even a fork that only lists the apps that are
indicated to be adaptive you know you can always write anything in metadata nobody checks
so you could claim your app is super adaptive and it's not but then you will get that feedback so
don't do that and also don't do it because otherwise I really can't retire that website at any time
yeah so and then discover well it doesn't show adaptiveness but the thing is if something is
kirigami most of the time it should work except a few few things that don't but you don't need
everything in your phone right then there are of course also some cute widget apps that also work
only barely and if you're lucky
yeah and then metadata it's beautiful so my day job isn't publishing and in publishing we still love
xml and abstream metadata is also xml and so this is a common specification
that has been extended over the years I think that started I don't know decades ago or maybe
but it's definitely more than one decade at this point and there I have some links on the
site on a blog post and form fractures how to specify those before that there was an intern
specification by purism and you can put your licensing in there you can put description release
loads you know go crazy and the good thing is except for the release notes if I
execute a script I can pull all those nice informations into linux phone apps are no
ain't that great so yeah if you are developing an app please add metadata maybe there's a meta
info creator that makes that relatively easy I know it's some extra sure and it sucks and nobody
has the time but it's I think it's really useful for people and if you maybe want to contribute
and run through the code forges and find apps that don't have metadata and make merge or pull
requests adding that metadata go for it thank you yeah but with that express the metadata sorry
about my excitement for xml nobody likes that anymore I know
highlights for apps I don't think I need to iterate through the app just highlight itinerary
it's really a better travel companion than the app by Deutsche Bahn for example which I know
very much unfortunately because it's generally not only taste you about delays but it also tells you
how to get from that one platform you have to start changing trains on to the other platform so you
can see that because it's not always that numbers that are next to each other are on the same platform
and that matters if things are delayed once again and then angle fish nice mobile web browser also
on SafeWishers like I mentioned and then pure maps pure maps again we had that before could also
have been on the Ubuntu touch list pure maps well everywhere oh I forgot cast so sorry cast is
it's also great it's really feature rich does chapter markers I like podcasts sorry
and then highlights in the norm side well chats and calls because you know sms mms calls who wants to
get phone calls but yeah people do and if all your stack works it works even as a
yeah very worst client again that's from the poll and also it's really nice
10 gram that's little thing for web apps you can also use it on your desktop all of these apps are
also available on your desktop so if you don't have Linux phone you can also use all of these apps on
the past two slides and they are also great on desktop because adaptive apps aim to be great
anywhere and I think these listed here all succeeded that and then of course communication
railway like maybe maybe I trouble the trains too much I don't know can you travel to the trains too
much no idea and then spot Spotify premium again API magic and then flat sale because helps sometimes
and then other highlights so these are apps that are on kiri gami and I've put two matrix clients
and they may be I use too much metrics yeah and I must use too much metrics so one is using
cute quick components to Nico and the other one is using flutter
so special one apps that run anywhere on mobile Linux we had no pure maps
maps navigation whatnot and maze fish smart watches and stuff is that and then kaitan that's an xmpp
client and yeah it's only in ubuntu touch 64 that's why the asterisk is there but otherwise
looks like building cute apps that are cross-platform is possible
another special apps that run everywhere including legacy platforms
so iOS and Android well see next talk flutter maybe I don't know we're really interested looking forward
to that and then current gaps so what if you are have time and want to start here's the list
we already saw that some of these things are solved somewhere I think you're going to touch also as a
cryptocurrency wallet if you need that I don't know maybe you do and then of course what's that yeah
tough and then more current gaps that I found elsewhere attention grabbing social media I think
we need Instagram and TikTok to make that mainstream and we need Facebook for the Grand
Parents and we need office clients to edit fucked word documents and shit and axler well you
need that there are some approaches by the way that's one kt app and then yeah so gaps this
brings me to packaging um aside from metadata you know releasing an app helps I'm not explicitly
said stating that I'm looking at k delta chat in this very moment but I am so that's nice
app it works delta chat is encrypted chat via email protocols nice but no release so not package
anywhere aside from a u r and xOS yeah and also I mean maybe maybe flat up so in my little impromptu
poll one answer was and that made me really so yeah this app seems great I'm looking very much
forward to it land in db and stable and I'm like oh god this person is patient should learn something
from them crazy yeah so please if you maintain an app maybe do that toggle thing release it at some
point you know don't release it while it doesn't work won't help anyone but maybe release it once it
when it won't when it barely works because it works barely but works then of course
flatter apps build only for x86 64 linux
electrode apps build only for 886 64 linux what the fuck signal
and then generally apps build only for x86 64 linux you know aside from doing this mobile
linux phone thing I've been running arm laptops for years and it's I mean now with fast arm laptops
it's less of a problem you can compile shit but oh god imagine the pine book and then compiling a big
electron app I mean you can't do that but boy that's like waiting for stuff landing in db and stable
yeah then future challenges things get worse actually more and more services disappear behind
apps and they in apps that are you know on the android side require play service often
and thus don't easily work in bed right and that's a deal for public and private services so I think
this is some german examples who cares but yeah we need virtualized android maybe we need to reverse
engineer other things or we need to push government well governments I mean we're in brussels here
double capital Belgium and the EU and NATO they're not state whatever but yeah so
technical solution obvious one is the web and then of course what would I like to see more cross
project collaboration in the app space I think I stress that enough but I've made it it's
stress it enough to access to non-distribute sources easier and distributions and now that's
controversial like enabling flat up from the get go and maybe even the snap store oh god people
with throats brings at me and then donation bagging and other app install things maybe a future for
software thingies and then a bug tracker like mozilla's platform tilt if you don't know they list
this stuff whether disadvantage by last large companies also goes into that political avenue
and help with linux phone apps or or so yeah yeah I want to make it a progressive web app I want to
make search and filtering better but yeah who has time so conclusions I hope this wasn't too overwhelming
or boring there may be more apps than you'd think regarding initial assumptions I think
honestly despite trying to prove it people are just scratching their itch and that is perfectly fine
so thank you this is the stuff where can reach me and where the next four minutes are always and
if you want to contribute from agate it has issues with sign in so send just send that
page to the mailing list and that last link is a really cursed really bad my skills at web development
level thing that helps to create things time for questions thank you very much Peter any
questions from the audience ha successfully over they're all taking it in still bored them to tears
I'd ask the question oh it's actually not a question it's a statement this is David but no I just
wanted to I wanted to thank you for taking all your time and preparing the weekly post as a user of
mobile linux not so much a coder it has been huge to get me in the community to keep me in the
community keep me up to speed with everything that's happening I realize that one person can't
always do it but I just want to say thank you thank you that helps keep going
another question or statement yeah in the back we'll take a second
so I too want to have a Linux phone so can you please tell me how much time it's suffering do
I have to you have to give to to achieve that goal depends on your approach so I think it's
impossible to answer without knowing your specific use cases and the services you want to use and
how much pain you're willing to go through or whether you're going to be like well you know
wait right fine and also it depends on which hardware you choose but to go to hardware choices we
need first to establish which distribution you go on and then go down some huge decision tree maybe
that's a talk for next foster I have a pine phone but it's lying on my desk for I'm so it's catching
us like most of those yeah I've got one of those too so many two of those yeah so pine phone of
course since I've been paid by post marketer has no post marketer is amazing Mobian is also amazing
think those safe choices and then try to solve your issues one thing at a time but if you have
issues with your carrier and reliability and stuff then yeah it's get tough so maybe maybe
different device maybe different carrier it's it's complicated okay I keep on dreaming do that
a question from the matrix what do you think of box 64 I think we can use this to run some of our
x86 64 programs as a current worker on until we have a 64 version of the binaries I think in some
cases this is definitely useful and I think people love that for proprietary games mainly
um with some electron apps you can actually use an arm 64 electron runtime and then run that
so it's not always necessary to go that route but I mean why not so I personally haven't played
with that because I am too thick to understand the instructions and don't have the time but yeah box
64 also great just emulate shit works all right another question yeah there's one okay please pass on Mike
hi once again I echo the comment thank you very much for your weekly
lim mob log of everything that's going on in linux mobile but my question is I well I think it's
about purism about a year ago talked about a payment mechanism for developers I think maybe it's
like a theory of it but I don't know if there's any you know anything about that about how that might
be changing the landscape of linux mobile apps well I think it would be very good to have some
thing like that and they are in a place to do that as a business they've got an easier route to that
than all these non-profits um but I haven't don't have any news so I very much look forward to
something like that but as far as I know it's not happened yet thanks please give another round of applause