ev.phosh.mobi
Bits from the Phosh Contributors Meeting 2026
We recently held the Phosh Contributors Meeting 2026 in the Linuxhotel, Essen, Germany with contributors joining from India, Sweden, Czech Republic and Germany. It started on the evening of May 22nd and ended on the afternoon of May 24th.
**We’d like to thank allour supporters**. Your donations made this event possible! Many thanks as well to all participants for making the trip and dedicating their weekend to the project.
We had access to two seminar rooms at the venue which allowed to have one room for presentations and demos while the other provided space for smaller discussions or more quiet hacking. Since the weather was great throughout the weekend many discussions and hacking moved also outside into the park.
Below is a short summary of the event. The pad contains some more details.
# Friday
We had access to the venue from 18:00 but since a couple of participants had connections that arrived around lunch time, some of us already met at the park and had some food and informal discussions. We were then able to move into the seminar rooms a bit earlier, start the setup, settle in, hack a bit and get to know each other. Many of us met for the first time in person.
Later in the evening we had an extended discussion about a generic word correction / prediction interface that would be needed for text input via swipe typing (see Saturday’s talk on that by prawn).
The nice wooden sign was an unexpected gift from one of the participants. No worries, Phosh ♥️ postmarketOS (and other distros) too!
# Saturday
After some morning hacking the talks and demos started at 11:00. The first session gave a short demo of Phosh’s port to GTK4. It showed the main surfaces working, including top panel, overview and lock screen (including plugins). The remaining work is now split into two parts that can be done in parallel: landing the missing (but mostly working) GTK4 bits and fixing the remaining styling issues in Phosh. Help in the later part would be very welcome.
This was followed by a (surprisingly) short discussion about what should still be addressed before a Phosh 1.0 release. One participant suggested improvements for landscape mode, while the rest seemed happy with the status quo already. So maybe we see Phosh 1.0 later this year 🥳.
Gotam then demoed his work on Android app integration by simplifying the Waydroid setup, Android image download and APK installation and removal. This led to a discussion about implementation priorities, handling the installation of the needed distro packages, the impact on immutable images and how to handle the installation and removal of APKs in detail.
Oormila presented her master thesis which evaluated the onboarding experience for app developers in the Linux Mobile ecosystem and Phosh in particular. As part of her work she created a tutorial featuring a Flatpak based weather app using GTK, libadwaita and written in Rust. The tutorial was evaluated with participants online as well as participants at her university.
Prawn followed with an introduction to the history and technical background of swipe typing (slides). He explained his attempts to integrate that into Phosh’s on-screen keyboard stevia, how he joined forces with the HeliBoard developers on a common library, the necessity of voluntary data collection to accurately map gestures to words and the need for a generic interface to access correction and completion data on Linux.
The final presentation of the day was given by Ick who presented several mockups for phone shell UI and UX improvements. Starting with ideas on landscape mode handling on phones he switched to suggestions for app switching, power bar use and other areas of the shell. Some of the proposals gained consensus quickly, but those often require compositor work before they can be implemented in a maintainable way (one example being the transition from a running application to the overview). Other ideas will be refined iteratively after the migration to GTK4 as we want to leverage some of GTK4’s features (like the improved gestures and hardware acceleration) for that. Contributions in this area are also very welcome.
## Parallel Track: Merch and Booth Planning
Dana and Petra also ran a parallel track on Saturday focused on merchandise and preparations for the conference booth presence. They explored how we can better present Phosh at upcoming events and make the project more visible to a broader audience. The discussion covered ideas for new merchandise such as stickers, T-shirts, and other small items. Further work on designs and logistics will continue asynchronously with the wider community.
After the talks we had a great barbecue in the venue’s park, entirely self-organized by some of the participants. Many, many thanks to everybody involved.
The evening provided more time for discussions and some hacking. Some of the things we worked on included:
* A fix by David to patch the Wi-Fi firmware for the SHIFT6mq so it can work on Linux. Previously people usually grabbed the OnePlus6 firmware instead which is far from ideal.
* A prototype for two column landscape mode in Phosh’s top panel on phones
* Using OpenQA to verify BengalOS images (see demo on Sunday) by devrtz
* Polishing our mainline U-Boot support for the Librem 5 devkit. This has since been sent out.
# Sunday
Sunday started with a session on EUDI wallets. As passports and drivers licenses will be stored in digital wallets it is important that we get a Free Software solution for our systems. On Sunday Benedkit explained the requirements for that and the implications for Phosh and Mobile Linux in general (slides).
Afterwards Guido gave an overview of the history and current state of the BengalOS images built from Phosh’s nightly packages (slides). He demoed the immutable variant including the first boot assistant.
Devrtz then explained how to join Phosh.mobi e.V. as active or supporting member followed by a demo of his work on testing the BengalOS images via OpenQA (slides).
For the notes taken during the sessions see here.
After the group photo and lunch there was still some more time for discussions and hacking until people gradually started heading back home.
# Outlook
This event was intense and fun. It was great to have so many Phosh contributors together, discussing, hacking, building a future for Phosh, enjoing the barbecue and the time together. Many thanks to everyone involved in organizing and running our first contributors meeting. We’d very much like to repeat this next year.
Due to our association’s budget we limited the event to a single weekend and sixteen participants (of which two unfortunately couldn’t attend due to short term visa and flight issues). There was consensus among the participants that it would be very nice to extend future contributors meetings to more days as that would give us more room to actually hack on the things we discussed.
That’s where you can help: We’re always happy about any donation to fund future events but you can also help by spreading the word about our work, including companies that may be interested in supporting Phosh. We also offer a supporting membership. Becoming a supporting member helps us to plan future activities more reliably.
