KDE Plasma Mobile Has Been Making Great Progress

[uid313]

I haven't played with it, but I haven't seen any translation layer that doesn't incur a performance penalty. And fails to work for 100% of the existing apps.
Also, what hardware would run this? Android's hardware is almost exclusively closed source, with driver supporting relatively ancient kernels. You're showing me bits and pieces (Plasma Mobile, Anbox), I'm telling you even having all of these in place, it's still going to be an uphill battle getting a 3rd mobile OS to gain traction. If you disagree, leave me a note when a(ny) new mobile OS breaks 10% market share, ok?

Anbox is not an emulator or a simulator. It is not like console emulators like ZSNES. Anbox is more like Wine. Anbox is like it runs the Android user space on your systems Linux kernel, but in its own namespace so the performance should be native. But since it is not a Google-certified device it wont have access to Google Play services so the compatibility might not be great.
Drivers wont be a problem since you will be using your systems drivers, so the performance should not be a problem. But there might be other problems such as poor integration and compatibility.

[bug77]

What is really "emulation mode" and why is it a bad thing?
Anbox runs with Linux namespaces so it is not a virtual machine and nothing is really emulated.

I haven't played with it, but I haven't seen any translation layer that doesn't incur a performance penalty. And fails to work for 100% of the existing apps.
Also, what hardware would run this? Android's hardware is almost exclusively closed source, with driver supporting relatively ancient kernels. You're showing me bits and pieces (Plasma Mobile, Anbox), I'm telling you even having all of these in place, it's still going to be an uphill battle getting a 3rd mobile OS to gain traction. If you disagree, leave me a note when a(ny) new mobile OS breaks 10% market share, ok?

[uid313]

Yes, but those patches aren't about apps, but rather basic OS stuff (scheduling, device drivers and such).
Supporting Android apps will open up a pretty sizeable ecosystem, but the OS has to offer something relay, really special to be worth running virtually everything in emulation mode.

What is really "emulation mode" and why is it a bad thing?
Anbox runs with Linux namespaces so it is not a virtual machine and nothing is really emulated.

[bug77]

No, it's about manufacturers who do not sell phones with it preinstalled and make efforts to PREVENT installation of an alternative OS. Even Lineage OS, which is 100% compatible with Android apps (because it's Android) has insignificant make share due to manufacturers not preinstalling it (extremely rare) and Lineage OS being barely able to run correctly on a few recent devices.

And you don't thing the former is because of the latter?

More and more Android patches are getting mainlined to the Linux kernel.
With Anbox they could run Android applications on it.

Yes, but those patches aren't about apps, but rather basic OS stuff (scheduling, device drivers and such).
Supporting Android apps will open up a pretty sizeable ecosystem, but the OS has to offer something relay, really special to be worth running virtually everything in emulation mode.

[Awesomeness]

KDE is awesome, I still cannot understand how Canonical did not chose it for Ubuntu having plans for mobile devices too.

Canonical wouldn't have had control over the copyright.

[f0rmat]

I personally would love to see this succeed. I have a smart phone for three apps - one to communicate with my family and two to use for two factor authentication for work accounts. I am notoriously hard on phones so I have to use "ruggedized" phones that withstand physical punishment and I must have two SIM cards. (Unusual use case I know.) That leaves me pretty much with android. When ever I get a new one (or the system updates), I have to spend 2-3 hours going through all of the settings and shutting down permissions to almost every app - I mean why does a microphone need access to my location? If plasma mobile works and I can flash a phone that meets my needs and I am able to install the three aps I need, I would do it in a heart beat.

Competition, no matter how small, is always good.

It's not about corporations backing it. The KDE community can care less if facebook made an app for their UI because it's about open source, not proprietary spyware. That said, if mobile linux phones do ever gather the attention of developers, then plasma mobile can run those apps, even if they are GTK or Electron (or something proprietary), or an android app even in anbox. It's not limited to just QT apps, and you can run whatever. Good luck convincing the community they need a closed-source app though.

Ugh no, no Electron apps on mobile. That crap is slow and janky even on desktops, it's going to be so much worse on mobile. I've used this ReactNative and Electron crap on Android, it runs like crap. Native apps run so much better than any of this browser shipped inside an app crap.

It doesn't matter, there's no room for another mobile OS if you built in on pixie dust.
Despite Microsoft's best efforts, developers just won't bother developing for more than two operating systems. Imagine how "well" this will go for companies smaller than Microsoft that give it a shot.

Well not immediately of course, it takes time for it to happen, and requires partnerships with many other companies. So unfortunately only someone with big pockets has the chance of pulling it off.

[Baguy]

To throw my two cents into the ring. It looks like plasma mobile is doing exactly what their website promised. "Plasma Mobile is an open-source user interface for phones... Plasma Mobile turns your phone into a fully hacking device." (https://www.plasma-mobile.org/) So far it is both open source and has turned my PinePhone Braveheart Edition into a device I can hack around with. It is far from perfect, but Plasma Mobile is also far from what it was on the day when I first flashed my SD card.

Some may wish to argue, "What is the point of PM when mature mobile platforms and mobile UIs already exist." One could assume that Linus's peers might have wondered the something similar back in the day when he introduced his little fledging home project: the Linux kernel. It's too soon for us to exclaim "waste of effort" on Plasma Mobile. Even in the worst case scenario that it goes nowhere, was it truly a waste for the developers who learned something from the process? Or was it a waste for the improvements made to shared framework's libraries that may be used by other projects (or are currently being used). I would believe not. As long as the code is FLOSS, the effort is preserved for the future; whether it be as a functional mobile platform, a teaching experience, or just some better libs as a part of a desktop shell.

Plasma Mobile, Phosh, Lomiri, and the other mobile FLOSS shells are young code in terms of functional maturity. Let's see where the hands of time take these projects before we prophesize their fate.

Absolutely!

[Shiba]

I didn't say it's about corporations, I said it's about developers. And developers won't bother.

It seems to me that they are. Of course I don't give a damn about developers of proprietary garbage, same as on desktop.