In around two weeks I’m migrating from iOS to a postmarketOS phone. Please leave app suggestions, I’m definitely going to need them!

Waydroid is… fine, but not preferred Please avoid android apps unless it’s something that is like confirmed to work well on waydroid, is proprietary or something so has no alternatives or something like that. I’m not launching waydroid to listen to music, to read my e-mails or to use xmpp.

Some examples of what I’m looking for, probably for Plasma Mobile:

1. Is there like… LibreOffice Mobile or something? To substitute the iWork suite?
2. Apple Music clients
3. Something self-hosted to substitute Siri, with ability to set timers and stuff
4. A reminders app that can sync with a caldav server
5. Is there a port of GadgetBridge for Linux?
6. I’ll probably make my own water logging and HealthKit-alternative app/“protocol” if that’s not a thing yet, but less work is less work if that exists
7. A XMPP client, preferably with spaces support
8. Immich client (preferably with some form of caching for recent photos)
9. Bitwarden client
10. HomeAssistant client
11. E-mail client
12. These will probably go on waydroid, but: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Signal clients (Edit: WhatsApp works on ATL apparently!)
13. Some kind of map app, maybe with live traffic data?
14. Some kind of backup wizzard to my NAS, tho I’ll probably just make some rsync scripts
15. A better keyboard than Plasma Mobile’s default

And also just anything y’all find useful in your daily life with a postmarketOS daily driver, I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of stuff here.

I know some of those exist for desktop Linux, but I’m obviously looking for stuff made with phones in mind (so like… apps made for gnome should be automatically fine maybe?)

(Also, has anyone managed to get nix’s system-manager to work on postmarketOS? There’s no way I’m configuring all of this by hand every time I need to flash it lmao)

#postmarketOS #LinuxMobile #Linux

@luana

so like… apps made for gnome should be automatically fine maybe?

Vast majority of libadwaita apps are gonna be fine. In general you can assume that they by default will work fine.

Sadly I do not have any suggestions for any app you need, but if you like listening to radio stations I recommend Shortwave. It's a neat app.

@luana I suggest moving from Apple music to a service that has fewer ethical issues and pays the artists better. Qobuz is my service of choice now. Migrating playlists was automated when I signed up.

@richardwonka that doesn’t seem to have a Linux app at all, much less a Linux app for phones

@luana Cheogram as an xmpp client, dunno if it has spaces support.

FairMail for email client.

@luana comaps is good for navigation; i do not know if it runs on your os. Please let us know!

@richardwonka @luana it *is* on Flathub but don't hold your breath... sadly not mobile-friendly :p

"Pure Maps" works for me, with some jank. GNOME Maps was good back on GNOME Mobile, but it freezes Plasma Mobile for me, need to investigate.

I’ll probably take a look at linuxphoneapps.org too, but recommendations from folks who actually use the apps would be nice :3

@luana based,,,

@luana btw try to get the openrc variant first, if theres an option to avoid slopstemd go for it

@luana in the case of discord, if you open it from the web browser and it detects that you are on mobile, it shows a mobile-friendly version of the desktop UI

thats how i use discord on my android phone at least, and it works quite well (probably a bit slower than the app though)

as for whatsapp on waydroid, if you dont need google play services for anything else and you'd rather avoid them in the waydroid container, whatsapp gives a direct download to the apk in their website: https://www.whatsapp.com/android (you will probably need some extra app for push notifications if you install whatsapp like this though)

@luana for an xmpp client kaidan might be good enough (idk about spaces support and it appears that my xmpp server is down so i can't check)
for discord i think your best bet is probably dissent (which is gtk4 sadly) or maybe just use a pwa as i think they added a mobile layout for the webapp
signal is a bit of a dead end as flare last time i tried to use it barely worked and it's gtk4, i think i did see a project that did tweak the electron desktop client for linux mobile, i can't remember where that was from though
for telegram the official desktop client should be good enough as when i last used it basically had all the features of the mobile app (although i think they removed sign ups from it), also iirc it's qt and not electron which is a bonus
for the email client, the pmos repos have mobile-config-thunderbird which should make thunderbird more better on mobile, my second recommendation would be geary, but i've had problems with it remembering the email passwords so i would just use thunderbird
for all the others i don't really have much of a clue apart from the new plasma keyboard is better than the old maliit keyboard but it's still missing the keyboard height adjustment though, all of the onscreen keyboards suck in their own ways unfortunately

@luana very cool, never used pmos before but am intrigued. Will watch this space!

@luana hi! Daily driving Plasma Mobile for a couple months (and pmOS for half a year).

Can't answer all, but here's some:

1. Not that I'm aware of, but libadwaita apps seem to work relatively well, so maybe you can find something there?
4. CalDav syncing seems to work from Nextcloud via the system settings. Not sure about non-NC
5. For what watch? There's RockWork for Pebble watches, which I packaged, but is not mergable as it depends on Qt5. I'm working on-and-off on a GTK replacement

1/?

@luana
9. There's BitRitter, but I haven't gotten it to log in successfully yet. I use the FF extension otherwise, and manually copy passwords.
10. There's Butler which just wraps a webview, but no widgets or anything AFAIK. Butler fails to log in for me but it might be an issue on my side.
11. I use Geary, which works if you get past the janky UI. There's a mobile-config-thunderbird but it doesn't render any emails for me.

2/?

@luana
12. Maybe you can bridge them to XMPP or Matrix? For Signal there is a native client called Flare, which is very good, but not 100% for receiving/sending (due to Signal changing their API frequently methinks)

13. I currently use Pure Maps for turn-by-turn. It has an online mode, but dunno about traffic. There's GNOME Maps as well but it freezes my phone.

15. There's Unfettered Keyboard, which I used to type all these. I really love it, and am working on adding some missing bits!

3/3

@allpurposemat I’ll try those out, thanks a lot!!

1. which watch?

Garmin Venu 4

@luana plannify is really good for reminders etc https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.alainm23.planify

@stovis oh that looks cool, thanks!

@hsza as I mentioned I’m getting nix and system-manager on it, so unless the openrc family gets a feature-complete systemd-compatible implementation that’ll unfortunately be a no

@luana please ler me know what mobile you are getting. :) I'm looking for onde too.

@rodolforg Fairphone 6. Hopefully I can learn something about drivers and help them getting the cameras and audio to work lmao

@luana oh I think it wouldn't work on my country...

@rodolforg hmmm which country?

@luana really nice! Just need to keep in mind, that you might want to keep a second phone around for calls, since that is still not very reliable at the moment, but hopefully that'll change soon.

Have fun!

@luana Bookmarking this post for future interest. The one suggestion I'd have is to maybe look into Droidian if you want a mobile operating system that you can daily drive; It doesn't use a mainline kernel but as a result seems to support hardware much better.

I wish you luck on your journey!

@fun I’ll keep a secundary phone at home for bank apps, tho I don’t really have a secondary phone number for calls. Rn the phone I got doesn’t support audio yet according to the wiki, but once that’s done I guess I could just use voip if calls don’t work well. It’s basically just spam calls anyway (this reminds me, I’ll need to see if kde has a setting to ignore calls from unknown numbers).

@luana@wetdry.world

wvkbd-mobintl is a great keyboard, you may need to compile from source to get all options, i use env variables:

export KEYBOARD=wvkbd-deskintl
export KEYBOARD_ARGS="-l full,special -H 440 -fn 'Hack 18'"

sylpheed is a good simple email client, if your screen is not too small it could be ok, i just use aerc in terminal for occasional email from my pmOS tablet

@luana
1. I have not looked into it recently, but there may be something eventually: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/RHYUKB-collabora-office-on-linux-mobile/ (You can also set scaling lower and try LibreOffice Desktop,... but it's not fun. There's also https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.codelogistics.letters

2. Apple Music is a tough one,... Cider was on my evaluation list when it was still open-source,...  There's https://github.com/wimpysworld/sidra (but you'll have to build it on your own, that x86_64 AppImage won't work). I suppose that a WideWine enabled web browser may suffice, but see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Widevine

3. no idea

4. +1 for Planify

5. No, in a way, Amazfish is 'a gadgetbridge on Linux',  but I don't think it supports your watch

6. See https://linuxphoneapps.org/categories/health/ + https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.luigi311.fitness-tracker + https://flathub.org/en/apps/de.wger.flutter

7. Difficult, as has been discussed, please note that Kaidan implements an incompatible,  newer OMEMO most other clients don't support

8. I don't use Immich, but heard good things about https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.nicx.mimick

9. I don't use BitWarden, and there's not too many apps for it IIRC, when I looked into it,  there were BitRitter (still alive) and GoldWarden (unmaintained). There's a multitude of Pass clients and a few KeePass clients though.

10. I don't use Home Assistant, so...

11. Surprisingly difficult. Since you want to use Plasma Mobile, Merkuro Mail is worth a try - when I last tried it, it worked fine as a mail viewer, but felt unfinished. Geary may or may not be alive and slowly moving to GTK4 - I've mostly used mobile-config-thunderbird, which still worked for me two weeks ago (when my OnePlus 6 bit the dust). I'll see if I manage to set up again.

12. I don't use WhatsApp or Discord, Telegram Desktop is ok on Mobile, for Signal I use Signal Desktop with some Droidian patches on top https://github.com/droidian/Signal-Desktop - Signal Desktop may be able to work without a mobile install in the future.

13. I think just about every option available has already been discussed, you can also try setting up Apple Maps or Google Maps as
a web app, e.g., with Angelfish or with https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.pvermeer.WebAppHub and Chromium. I have used the desktop variant of Organic Maps as discussed here https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/app.organicmaps.desktop/#notice - but I don't use navigation, I just look at maps

14. https://linuxphoneapps.org/categories/backup/

15. https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/noappid.flamingradian.unfettered-keyboard/ is said to work with Plasma Mobile, I don't think Stevia or Squeekboard work with it

Good luck!

@linuxphoneapps

unfettered-keyboard/ is said to work with Plasma Mobile, I don't think Stevia or Squeekboard work with it

Stevia doesn’t work? Damn that might be the thing that makes me move to Phosh instead then… Stevia seems really good from the pictures and screen recordings, Plasma’s keyboard is awful. I’ve been recommended Unfettered, but I can’t find any screenshots of it anywhere so I’ll have to try it out

@allpurposemat @luana I would like to support you by the pebble gtk4/libadwaita pebble conpanion app. We can work together on that. What do you think about that?

@bjawebos hey, that sounds great! Currently I have the Rockwork daemon working locally with my new watch, and it exposes a DBus API that a GTK client app could talk to. I started work a while ago on a GTK client app with the goal of loosely following the Figma designs for Cobble: https://git.allpurposem.at/mat/bouldy

I didn't get much further than connecting to the daemon though, as my null experience with Rust, DBus, and GTK was a big bottleneck :)
Would you like to chat on Matrix?

@luana I can recommand freetube, fractal (Matrix / XMPP) and tuba (Fediverse).

I use phosh and I like gnome podcasts a lot.
I also use secrets for keepass for managing my passwords and authenticator for 2FA.

@wawaxx Fractal doesn’t support XMPP, only Matrix

@dan you're right, thank you for the precision

@luana I used to use (GNOME) Health for health tracking but one day my data was just all gone ☹️ Stopped using it at that point. It's also effectively unmaintained.

Ok, y'all weren't lying when y'all said Telegram Desktop worked well on Libux Mobile. It even has touchscreen gesturea and everything!! Completely on-par usability with the android/iOS app. Impressive!