Purism Provides Updates On Their Calls & Messaging Librem 5 Smartphone Apps

[Speedator]

starshipeleven Using qwertz every day I can’t remember a smartphone keyboard without y. And it is not less common than x.

[Dr.Nop]

Reminds me of the Neo Freerunner / OpenMoko I once had. At first the developers said, we can use the existing free software stack with little adaptations and everything will be ready soon. Instead of doing these adaptations they first bought new office equipment, ditched the existing applications because the architecture was not good enough, changed several times the software stack, reimplemented everything in Vala as this is much better and afterwards just left the project. The phone was never ready for daily use.
Luckily someone bought my phone on ebay, even after two years.

It is a matter of trust into the executing company and personally I don't have this trust. I think there needs to be strong project management and a goal which gets followed up by tough guys. Right now they have nothing else than mockups and drafts and not even a reliable and resilient plan. Sorry, the thing would be cool, but my guess is: No.

[cybertraveler]

Reminds me of the Neo Freerunner / OpenMoko I once had. At first the developers said, we can use the existing free software stack with little adaptations and everything will be ready soon. Instead of doing these adaptations they first bought new office equipment, ditched the existing applications because the architecture was not good enough, changed several times the software stack, reimplemented everything in Vala as this is much better and afterwards just left the project. The phone was never ready for daily use.
Luckily someone bought my phone on ebay, even after two years.

It is a matter of trust into the executing company and personally I don't have this trust. I think there needs to be strong project management and a goal which gets followed up by tough guys. Right now they have nothing else than mockups and drafts and not even a reliable and resilient plan. Sorry, the thing would be cool, but my guess is: No.

Agreed.

I think they should pick a software stack which looks like it has most of what they need and then put all their focus on producing the MVP (minimum viable product). This very article contains an example: If the Gnome Fragments messaging app looks almost good enough, then they should just be tweaking it and using that. If their ultimate goal is to produce a more simple messaging app, that can come later.

The only exception to the above I can think of, is the low level architectural and API stuff. I think they should get that as close to perfect before release as possible. It will be a lot harder to change that after release when people have started building ontop of their platform.

I hope we're both wrong and they manage to produce a working phone that implements their grand plan.

[L_A_G]

Is it just me or does the collar of the person in the first mock-up image make it look like a muppet with their mouth open at first glance?

[Vistaus]

That's a Qwertz keyboard, keyboard layout for Germany/Austria. They don't have much words that need "y" in German.

I still find that very strange though 'cause here in the Netherlands, we have more words with a "z" than with a "y", yet we still use the QWERTY layout rather than the QWERTZ layout.

[Lanz]

Wait... a GNOME app had _too many_ features to be used?

[cybertraveler]

Wait... a GNOME app had _too many_ features to be used?

Ha ha, oh yeah.