KDE's Plasma Mobile Roadmap From A Feature Phone To A Full-Featured Smartphone

[theriddick]

Google Now is a pestilence on android phones. Not only does it listen all the time draining the battery power, it infects the user interface with permanent buttons or pull out nobs etc.. I hope they have common sense to allow MUCH more control over any voice listening assistant!

[JTRealms]

Ive found documentation for Plasma Mobile quite inaccessible, kinda similar to the situation Ubuntu Touch was in. Id love to port it to my op3, but ubuntu touch was a nightmare. Porting this to existing phones is essential to get this some traction. And think to keep this from going the way of Ubuntu Touch, focus on exciting the XDA crowd and get it running nicely on enthusiast phones before you even look at creating your own device.

[ehansin]

Well, there is the Halium Project. I remember when Plasma developer Bhushan Shah announced it back a few months ago. It's a Linux distro that standardizes the lower level software (such as Ofono as shemerl mentioned) in order to support multiple projects such as Plasma Mobile, UBports (Ubuntu Touch's and Unity's new home), etc. It uses Android 7 has a base because Bhushan Shah was hoping to add support for OnePlus 3, 3T, and 5 with it (but I'm not sure how far along that is).

I also want to mention that the blog has only one post since it seems that each developer prefers using their own respective blog/mailing list.

Thanks CTown to you as well! I had not seen this one before.

On a little rant here (not in a negative sense, just tossing out some thoughts), I really want to see more choices in the smartphone front. The iPhone showed what was possible in a new form factor, and obviously it proved to be popular. Android jumped into the game as a successful alternative OS in the same form factor (in this case many hardware vendors vs. just Apple.) But I don't like the closed nature of iOS and I don't really think Android is that respectful of privacy and options. I cannot speak of any of the Android derivatives, and I think the Google Android UI is ugly anyway.

Once the core lower level stuff (including things like display server and audio core) get solid as standards, the upper level stuff will start to shine (i.e. UI stuff), with multiple alternatives. Imagine an ecosystem where the standardized core is free and open, respects privacy, and can be a base where applications can be built on that could run on the various UI manifestations. I get that often apps are tied to various desktops and tool kits. But with the common Linux desktop core, we can run apps in various desktop environments and window managers.

At any rate, not liking the world view of Apple and Google running the show in this space. As a side note, add in Amazon with there Alexa junk. Hopefully you get the picture, huge companies running all this crap. No thanks!

[starshipeleven]

you can trash that project right now. they do the same mistake sailfish did: promising android app support. this will lead to A) no one will code native apps if its not kde themselvs. because its not worth the effort getting in competition with android apps. B) the android apps will not work correctly, so every user gets angry because there are no native apps to switch to.

There is no escape from "not worth the effort getting in competition with android apps" anyway. It's not like they can even hope to compete with a market as large as 2 billion devices.

[starshipeleven]

Ive found documentation for Plasma Mobile quite inaccessible, kinda similar to the situation Ubuntu Touch was in. Id love to port it to my op3, but ubuntu touch was a nightmare. Porting this to existing phones is essential to get this some traction. And think to keep this from going the way of Ubuntu Touch, focus on exciting the XDA crowd and get it running nicely on enthusiast phones before you even look at creating your own device.

This. Many times this.