Applications by category/Contributing

< Applications by category‎

Thanks for wanting to contribute to postmarketOS' applications list! Please skim through following notices to avoid misunderstandings. If you are unsure whether your app satisfies the requirements, please open an issue on the wiki's GitLab page. Do the same when you want to excite a discussion about any of the requirements!

Note: Following guidelines are not effective for inclusions of apps in the repository, but only for the Applications by category page that is intended to serve as an application discovery page for postmarketOS users.

General Overview

The intention of the app page is to highlight apps that are available on postmarketOS and work reasonably well on mobile devices. It aims to be easy to skim through for the purpose of discovering new apps, while providing important general information for each entry in a straightforward and concise way.

Its design is based upon ArchWiki's List of Applications. As such, a slightly modified version of ArchWiki's app template is used. The only difference lies in the introduction of app antifeatures via the template Template:AppAntifeature (or its short-hand alias Template:Appaf) which are in turn based upon F-Droid's Anti-Features. Those antifeatures are used to describe properties of an application not adhering to postmarketOS' principles or otherwise not following the intentions of the pmOS project.

Usage of templates

For a general introduction to MediaWiki Templates, look at their wiki. The app list makes heavy use of this feature to generalize as well as simplify formatting and link generation.

Here is an overview of commonly used templates in the list:

Template:App to create an app entry
Linking packages

Template:aport for Alpine packages
Template:pmaport for pmOS packages
Template:Flathub for Flatpak packages from the Flathub repository

Template:AppAntifeature to substitute standard antifeature texts (as explained above)

Detailed usage instructions and an overview of all arguments can be found on their respective wiki pages. Please be careful when editing the template pages themselves, since it may break our application page. And, please use the templates!

Requirements for inclusion of apps

Since postmarketOS is suited towards mobile use and has some rather strict principles, the requirements of inclusion into this app list differ heavily from Arch's ones. Included apps must be

available on Alpine / pmOS via official repositories or a supported 3rd party distribution channel (e.g. Flatpak)
usable on mobile, at least through custom tweaks (thus: no CLI applications)
non-proprietary (but open clients for proprietary web-services are allowed, even if discouraged)
tested, at least in a pmOS virtual machine
if applicable, tagged with antifeatures!

Antifeatures

Antifeatures just describe a property of an application that isn't following postmarketOS' principles or otherwise doesn't quite match the purpose of this app list. Please take a look at Template:AppAntifeature for a complete list of currently defined antifeatures and usage instructions for that template.

Apps not available on pmOS

… can not be included (as mentioned above) in this list. If you are willing to maintain the package in Alpine Linux or postmarketOS, you can take a shot at packaging it yourself. Don't hesitate to ask for help in our various chat channels.

If you think there is a great benefit in having the package in postmarketOS or Alpine, and you can't package it yourself, consider reporting an issue in the pmaports tracker.

Further notices

Information in the following passage is likely to become outdated quickly.

Right now there is no central roadmap for the application page. If you want to help, but don't know where to start, you may be interested in this GitLab issue (wiki#59) which includes current TODO items. Same goes for application requests (if you don't want / have the time to add them yourself), at the moment the right place to discuss this is aforementioned issue.