A few days ago, the Phosh team published some of their progress and they were interesting, but today an article was published about what's new in GNOME Shell Mobile and it is more than interesting, impressive. This is the proposal of the GNOME Project, so it is up in the air how it will continue to promote Phosh when they release the first stable version of your own work.
phosh It has never had the design that I would have liked, and Plasma still looks like a work in progress. The demo published by GNOME is very reminiscent of what we see on the best Android phones or even the Apple iPhone. No, I'm not exaggerating. Although you have to keep in mind that it is a demo, everything looks too good.
GNOME Shell Mobile hits the gas
Admission from the GNOME blog has a lot of text (insert Yoda meme here), but also videos. And as a picture is worth a thousand words, I link here the videos, which are not wasted.
In this first we see how sliding a finger from below would enter the «Overview», or what we call mobile multitasking. A search box appears, the cards of the open applications and below it as an app drawer. As data, they close completely by sliding the cards up. Furthermore, the line at the bottom allows us to switch to the app on the left or right by swiping in one of those directions.
With regards to search, that this does not appear in the video but in a capture in the original article, coincidences will appear as we write, including those that have to do with adjustments.
In this second we see the browser and the virtual keyboard, the normal keyboard on any phone. It has a good design that fits perfectly on mobile and supports emojis. The entrance animation is also very smooth.
In the following we see the app drawer or “grid”, more specifically how we can order the application icons. Everything looks very “mobile”, that is, it doesn't clash with what we are used to seeing on Android or iOS/iPadOS: if we put an icon on top of another application, a new folder will be created, or we can move them wherever we want. This, like everything else, and remembering that it is a demo, works without any delays or jerks. It's all fluidity. I insist that it is a demonstration because this type of test is done in the best possible conditions, and then it may not look as good when we try it at home.
In the fourth and last video they show us what the control center would be, with the quick settings and some widgets such as the music one.
what's next
GNOME Shell for mobile It hasn't been long since it was announced., and the progress they have made in such a short time is impressive. But of course, they don't have anything for general use yet, and they have to keep improving. In the roadmap, the project says that it has to do that "the mobile experience is truly amazing“, adding things like:
- Lock screen calls (i.e. an API for apps to draw on the lock screen).
- Emergency calls.
- Haptic response.
- Unlock with PIN.
- Adaptation of the keyboard layout of the terminal for mobile, more custom keyboard layouts, for example, for URLs.
- Revamped notifications, including grouping and better actions.
- Flashlight quick settings activation.
- Reordering of the workspace in the overview.
To test it, the project recommends using GNOME OS Nightly. They also mention postmarketOS, but no images available, or their own, but they haven't published them yet either. Therefore, the only valid option would be the first one, but I would wait for specific images to be released.
GNOME Shell for mobile paints well, and it paints the overall picture even better now that this second big project (the other one would be KDE) has come into play and is playing really well.