I recently tried Phosh for the first time and came away really impressed. The experience is much more polished than I expected, and it got me looking more seriously at which apps actually work on phones and tablets.
Which brings me to a small proposal for Software. Right now there’s no way to browse and see only the apps that support phones and tablets. You can find that info on apps.gnome.org (the mobile icon next to supported apps), but inside Software itself you basically have to open each app’s page and check.
What I’d suggest is a third filter next to the existing Verified Publishers one, something like “Adaptive apps only” that limits results to apps declaring support for phone and tablet form factors.
The data for this already exists: AppStream has the `` tag with values like `mobile`, `tablet`, `desktop` and apps.gnome.org is already reading it to show the mobile icon. So this is mostly about exposing in Software a signal it already has access to, rather than building anything new underneath.
A few reasons I think it’d be worth doing:
- People running Phosh, postmarketOS, the Librem 5, etc. need this far more than desktop users, and Software is their main way of finding apps.
- Convertible and touch users on desktop benefit too.- It gives some visibility to developers who put the work into making their apps adaptive. Right now that effort is basically invisible inside Software.
If there’s interest, I’d be happy to go ahead with the implementation myself. Wanted to float it here first to see whether the maintainers and designers think it’s a reasonable direction, and whether there’s prior thinking on this I might’ve missed.
Sure, I think that would be a nice thing to have. We’d potentially not want to show the filter when running on a desktop (unless we think there are going to be a significant number of mobile-only apps which a desktop user would want to filter out).
The first step would be for you to work with the design team to put together a mockup for how it should fit into the UI. Another community member made some proposals for other filters a while ago so perhaps that could be built on or integrated.
I’m happy to help review stuff, but don’t have time to work on this feature myself.
You may be interested in Bazaar: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.kolunmi.Bazaar. It has a Mobile section. For this it looks in the appstream data for apps which have requires, recommends or supports touch control. IDK that appstream data shows whether an app is adaptive or not.
Actually the search improvements proposed by John might be even better approach than what I suggested. It would be more visible for the users than an option in settings.
There hasn’t been much activity on that GitLab issue, should the conversation move there?
Hi Jake, yeah I tried Bazaar and am using it atm, however given its not the official GNOME app I feel its still worth adding this feature to GNOME Software, unless Bazaar will replace it at some point?
It was just a suggestion “here’s how Bazaar implemented it.” And for any readers interested in having it now.
Looking at the apps.gnome.org website Teams / Websites / apps.gnome.org · GitLab, I wonder how it works currently. The docs says it’s looking for a Purism::form_factor element in the appstream data but I can’t find that for any of the mobile supporting apps listed on that website.
IDK which is the most reliable way to discover mobile supporting apps. But maybe for phones you actually want to look for both display length 360 and touch control.
