Purism Librem 5 - Nextcloud & apps (talk, etc.)

Good morning, everyone,

As you know, the Purism Librem 5 smartphone is currently in production, and there is a partnership between Nextcloud and Purism for this smartphone.

  1. So what does it consist of? What is the status of this partnership in terms of applications (is there currently a Nextcloud client in the PureOS app store and is it suitable for smartphone displays) ? If not yet, when do you plan to issue it ?

  2. Finally, VERY IMPORTANT: is the Talk application available? And if so, does it use Google Cloud Messenging? (We know that on F-droid, it is impossible to receive call/message notifications because GCM is the only way the developers have found to notify the user, which is a big privacy issue).

Thank you for your feedback

Hmm, by my educated guess the options are probably right now:

  1. Standard Nextcloud Gnome3 integration - pretty nice but connects directly through WebDAV / CalDAV no background file syncing.
  2. Run the Linux desktop client compiled for ARM. UI isn’t really optimized for mobile, but it should work.

But that’s just a guess.

Edit: Talk… no idea. Would not use anyways. Try JSXC XMPP instead. Librem5 will have a XMPP client build in.

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Not sure who could answer these questions best and if there is somebody here in the forum.
Propably @jospoortvliet can you provide insides to the partnership with Purism and if there will be full-feature apps for the Librem 5?

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Thank you for your kind reply !

@Krischan : XMPP is too complex for standard users like me. When I see a tutorial (when you are motivated) and I see tons of code, I just abandon.

  1. How to use JSXC XMPP ? Do you just install app from Nextcloud app store, then it’s ready ?

  2. While the Librem 5 is still in production, is there any Android compatible client ?

Thank you very much.

I would push for a desktop version of the talk client that could be ported to librem 5. Talk is actually quite neat. Only lacks a desktop client.

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Its not too complicated, but the JSXC developers are also offering to host it for you so its a very simple setup.
On Android there are many good XMPP clients. Try Conversations, Quicksy or PixArt.

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For privacy purpose, I would prefer to host my own server (using Nextcloud server). There is a wiki for JSXC XMPP, so I hope to get enough motivation to be able to set it up !

@SmallOne : I agree that if I made comparison with Slack, Skype, etc., it is better to get a Desktop-client. A flathub-client would be nice as it would work on ARM (Librem 5) and X86_64 CPU (computers/laptops).

I, for one, hope that it’ll be very easy to set up Nextcloud Contacts to easily sync up and down to the Librem 5’s contacts app. To me, Contacts are a very basic “building block”, which other apps centrally rely upon. I feel it’s one of those fundamental basics which needs to work right, and be buttery smooth to set up and use.

The current situation with Android’s Contacts is no picnic, having to set up Davx5 very carefully to connect to Nextcloud. (Note: In Android, I can only get the Contacts sync to work in one direction with Nextcloud, at present. Edit: an upgrade on my phone from Android 9 to 10 fixed the problem. My phone vendor just released the Android 10 upgrade to me today.)

I’m also no fan of XMPP. I would prefer to see a good Matrix client first, over a good XMPP client on Open Source phones like the Librem 5, or the PinePhone.

Calendar and contact syncing should work out of the box on both (PinePhone with UBports).

And while IMHO modern XMPP is quite a bit better than Matrix, there is an excellent Matrix client for the UBports called FluffyChat.

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