Pinephone Application Compatibility

[coolusername]

Hi

I'm new to Linux phone and want to know what i can do with pinephone as a daily driver.
I don't really use too many apps on IOS but some applications are important like messaging and maybe clients for forums like reddit, etc.

Can i install any mainstream messaging app on Pinephone? (signal, session, etc)

Can i install clients to open reddit or other forums?

Thanks in advance.

[ryo]

I shouldn't really put much faith in web browsing in general.
In my experience, Qutebrowser is the fastest browser based on QtWebEngine (which is a stripped down Chromium engine).
Though I feel like Firefox ESR performs much better these days, but still wouldn't open up more than 4 tabs at the same time.
And you can thank "modern" web developers for that for making websites more resource demanding than your average 3D video game made by a AAA developer.

As for messaging, I don't really use anything other than XMPP these days, simply because I can't trust any other ones (I'd put IRC 2nd since even though it has no end to end encryption at all, at least there's no central authority involved).
XMPP is very well usable on the PinePhone, both Gajim and Dino work amazing on Phosh, though on Plasma Mobile you'll be better off with Dino Mobile, simply because both of them are GTK-based, and Plamo is still pretty lacky with GTK apps.
Pidgin (yet another GTK app) would probably work really well too, but I didn't try that one out myself.
IRC should work with HexChat, but IRC is so light it would even perform very well on a dinosaur bone, so no way you can't use it on a PinePhone.

As for other messengers, I heard there are unofficial clients for WhatsApp and Signal, but no experience.
Telegram comes pre-installed in many distro's, it's the desktop app, so you will still need to have an iOS or Android in order to login I believe.
For Matrix there's Mirage, but it's super slow when I last used it.
For Session you might be able to find the source code somehow and compile, but I doubt it because Electron (aka, Chromium dystopia pretending to be native desktop apps).
LINE can be used as a Chromium extension, which is extremely basic compared to the mobile apps which are proprietary and no desktop app available.
Discord is browser-only, best used via Qutebrowser and scaled down to 66% (reason to choose Qutebrowser for this is simply because you can click everywhere without having to worry to miss anything).
Zoom and Skype will most likely not work, but unless you're forced to use it with a boot pressing on your forehead, why would you even want to use these spying botnets?

And no knowledge about the millions of trillions of other chat apps and a few other chat protocols that exist or existed, so I'll leave it there.

[brb78]

Quite a few mobile-compatible apps are listed here https://linmobapps.frama.io/