Plasma Mobile: Inside KDE's Plan To Create A Full-featured Linux Smartphone Software

The Linux smartphone scenario has never been so exciting. Recently, Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone achieved its crowdfunding goal and scored partnerships from GNOME and KDE. On the other hand, postmarketOS is also showing some good promise.

When KDE partnered with Purism, it announced that Plasma Mobile will be ready for the real world and integrate with a commercial device for the first time. “Slowly, but surely, hardware vendors have discovered that Plasma Mobile is an entirely different software platform to build products on top of,” KDE developer Sebastian Kügler wrote in a blog post.

Sebastian has shared a Plasma Mobile Roadmap for the interested users and companies. The company wishes to develop a complete software platform for a smartphone. As a part of this process, the initial prototype is already finished and released in the past as the first public release of Plasma Mobile. Using the same, one can make phone calls, deal with apps, and some basic system functionality.

The next milestone in the roadmap talks about a feature phone, which is currently being worked upon. This aims at improving the existing prototype and making it usable for those who only want very basic features on a mobile device. Apart from making calls, these features are using address book and managing hardware functions like volume, time, screen, language, network, etc.

It’ll be followed by the development of Plasma Mobile for a basic smartphone which will bring more features like reading and sending emails, reminders, calendars, file management, etc. The team also wishes to extend the app ecosystem with the help of homegrown and third-party apps to bring a better experience to the users.

The final KDE Plasma Mobile milestone deals with creating a featured smartphone that will bring tons of system-level integration features like private cloud storage, more apps and games, etc. As KDE understands that it’s difficult to attract developers of apps like Whatsapp and Facebook, it aims to make Plasma Mobile compatible with Android apps. The blog post also describes it as a heavily requested feature.

When will be Plasma Mobile fully ready?

As Plasma Mobile is a result of collaborative effort of open source developers, KDE is dependent on the community participation as well. So, they haven’t set a deadline for the project and they plan to ship the product when it’s ready. “This “when” depends on all our input and hard work. So don’t sit in your armchairs and wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting, but let’s get cracking!” the blog post concludes.

Did you find this latest development in the direction of a Linux-powered smartphone exciting? Don’t forget to share your views with us.