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KDE Community Announces Fully Open Source Plasma Mobile

Posted by timothy on from the big-tent-takes-all-comers dept.

sfcrazy writes: Today, during the Akademy event, the KDE Community announced Plasma Mobile project. It's a Free (as in Freedom and beer), user-friendly, privacy-enabling and customizable platform for mobile devices. Plasma Mobile claims to be developed in an open process, and considering the community behind it, I don't doubt it. A great line: "Plasma Mobile is designed as an ‘inclusive’ platform and will support all kinds of apps. In addition to native apps written in Qt, it also supports GTK apps, Android apps, Ubuntu apps, and many others." And if you have a Nexus 5, you can download and play with a prototype now.

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. So, uh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    What is it?

    Distinctly left out of the summary...

  2. mobile needs *something*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I haven't used Plasma Mobile, but the current mobile ecosystem is a mess, so we badly need an alternative even if it is niche.

    Right now we have these choices:

    iOS - Huge app ecosystem, but a non-starter for anyone who doesn't consider it acceptable for Apple maintain control over everybody's device, able to censor what apps you can run, etc. It is not an open platform, it's a control-freak company deciding what you can and can't do.

    Android - Huge app ecosystem, but a non-starter for anyone who doesn't consider it acceptable for mass scale harvesting of personal data by an advertising company. It's a "half open" platform, but the app ecosystem is a clusterfuck of crapware.

    FirefoxOS - "web apps". Meh.

    I don't know if Plasma is the answer, but today we don't have an answer for people who want a good mobile platform that is beholden to the device's actual owner. If this thing can be on the side of its owners, and enough apps are developed and ported to be useful (it doesn't have to get anywhere near the iOS or Android level - even a few % of that is fine as long as it covers the major bases), maybe it is an interesting project.