Wiki

• FrontPage
• RecentChanges
• FindPage
• HelpContents
• MobileApps

Packages

This page tracks the availability of Mobile-friendly user-facing applications in Debian, where "mobile-friendly" means low-resource, graphical, touch-friendly, and fits onto small screens.

Available

Mobile-friendly applications in Debian:

Mobile-friendly chat and social media applications in Debian:

Mobile-friendly games in Debian:

Extensions to mobile-friendly applications in Debian:

Prospective

Mobile-friendly applications with some interest getting it in Debian.

RAM Use

There is now a RSS column for tracking RAM use of apps. This is not going to be very accurate but should be a rough guide. If you have a phone with 2G of RAM then you probably can't run 4 apps that each use 500M at the same time even if the accuracy is out by 20% performance will still be bad.

Work needs to be done on reducing RAM use for the FOSS stack in general and Debian in particular. Is there a Debian project to work on this? Can we encourage people to get involved in it? While mobile devices is going to be a common case of limited RAM performance overall will be better with less memory usage.

Notifications

As phones are devices that are commonly used in less secure environments the control of notifications is a security issue.

Here is a feature request for Geary to have a configuration option to control notifications.

We need similar features in all apps which handle potentially confidential data including Matrix and Jabber clients, SMS programs, etc.

We also need to have the ability to quickly and easily shut off all notifications for the environment (in phosh, plasma-mobile, and other environments for phones).

Things We Need

Here are applications that we need for replacing Android etc:

• Calendar (editing and displaying) with web backend for distributed use
• Contacts lists that integrates with Gmail and other services
• Note taking with web backend (like Google Keep)

• Remote desktop clients (Spice-client-gtk crashes on Librem5)

• OSM map viewer with offline support and use of vector data, e.g. Organic Maps

• Jabber/XMPP client with better support for small screens than the current Dino with libhandy patches

• Configuration of one of the web browsers to take over the "Android app that's just a web browser for one site" niche. That would mean creating separate icons for each special web site that launch the browser just for accessing that site not general use. Some of the largest fast-food companies have released such Android apps and they are handy to use

• Selection of on-screen keyboards similar to the f-droid selection to cater for different uses

• Word prediction and spelling correction in on-screen keyboards
• Integration of ML features into the OS as is being done by MS and Google (Alpaca takes 4G of RAM which fits on some phones)
• Find my phone service
• Family/friend tracking - opt in service for sharing location with others
• Voice input for dictation
• Voice assistant like Google/Apple
• Voice output
• Full operation for visually impaired people
• eBook reader. Ideally with the ability to synchronise the reading location with a server to allow moving between phone and laptop without losing your place.

• Better functionality for contacts would be good as proposed in the paper about "Pet Names.

Voice Output

The Festival system does text to speech. Here are some examples of commands to use it:

echo this is a test|text2wave |mpv -
lynx -dump $URL|text2wave |mpv -
pdftotext file.pdf -|text2wave |mpv -

This is not sufficient to address the needs for voice output. Generating the sound and playing it is the easy part, the hard part is determining what text to convert to speech, when to play it, and how to pause or cancel it.

The accessibility page has more information on a variety of accessibility options. This includes Speech-Dispatcher. Here is an example of how to use Speech-Dispatcher:

spd-say "some text"

Extending the List

If you find an mobile-friendly application not here but already in Debian, then please add it here.

If you find a mobile-friendly application not here and not in Debian, then please file an RFP or ITP bugreport and update this page with resulting bug number.

See also:

• Teams/Mobian/WantedPackages

• Teams/Mobian

• Mobile

• https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/prospective

• https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/

QT vs GTK

In Debian/Testing (as of 10th Apr 2024) the QT libraries support text-input-v2 and the GTK libraries support text-input-v3. If you run QT based apps under phoc the expected result is that clicking in an input field will not bring up the on-screen keyboard. To fix this we need the compositor to support multiple versions of the text input interface or for QT to support text-input-v3.

This is tracked for Wayland since 2021 and for QT since 2021, so probably won't happen soon.

The following commands will enable/disable the GTK on-screen keyboard to make things work:

busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b true
busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b false

Also a Bluetooth keyboard would work.

There is no Debian bug report for this as it's not clear what to file a bug report against. It seems that everyone thinks their stuff is OK.