08-08-2021, 05:03 PM
(07-28-2021, 01:02 AM)biketool Wrote: I am using Mobian so I get to see daily progress of the OS side with every update.
I also see a few people on the forums writing apps for the pinephone but they seem to be somewhat orphaned and the path to at least the Mobian repos is a very conservative one(that is good for a stable OS).
I feel like there is room for a unified community contrib or testing repo that has an autobuilder similar to what we had with Nokia Maemo community.
With a few tweaks to the autobuilder most pine distros could have packages built with deps and it would just be a matter of adding it to the deb or rpm sources.
I feel like this would get more exposure for new devs and make it easier for the stable OS devs to browse for vetted apps to fill out their repositories.
Since this proposed hub would be all pinephone the apps could be built for the targeted hardware.
As an example https://gitlab.com/lgtrombetta/pinephone-compass/ a great pinephone specific compass app where instead of upgrading form repo we have to hand build and hand uninstall to upgrade, this should be on a contrib or joint testing repo.
Maemo had a good program where they were throwing out all kinds of prizes for Maemo app development, but Nokia was a huge wealthy company Pine64 is not, I think even special forum flair, maybe front of the line opportunities for new hardware, and recognition as well as having the app on the unified repo would be enough to get more momentum behind pinephone specific app development where users can easily access these apps.
A desktop sized website similar to F-droid with quick install QR codes could also make browsing available software easier for both Pine owners and people curious about the project.
This is good suggestion and looking forward on PINE64 community organize an app store site. For sure provide some encouragement, swag, and PINE64 hardware can be offered.