Notes for application development

Phosh relies on freedesktop.org and Wayland protocols where possible. Sometimes we have phosh specific extensions though until changes made it into the spec.

Desktop Entry Specification

Phosh aims to parse app entries according to the Desktop Entry Specification. For some mobile needs phosh honors the following additional entries:

  • X-Purism-FormFactor: Allows app to specify that they are suitable for use on phones. Example: X-Purism-FormFactor=Workstation;Mobile;. Note that this will be phased out in favour of suppying this information via appstream metadata.
  • X-KDE-FormFactor: Similar to the above (used by some KDE applications)
  • X-Geoclue-Reason: Used to indicate the reason why an application wants to access location data.
  • X-Phosh-Lockscreen-Actions: Used to allow actions to be used on the lock screen. Example: X-Phosh-Lockscreen-Actions=app.stop-alarm::;app.snooze-alarm::;
  • X-Phosh-UsesFeedback: Used to indicate that application submit events to feedbackd to trigger audio, haptic or led feedback. This is useful for setting applications so they can show entries for individual apps. Example: X-Phosh-UsesFeedback=true

Desktop Notification Specification

Phosh’s notification server aims to adhere to the Desktop Notification Specification. On mobile we need some extensions to handle haptic and led feedback for those notifications. So phosh honors the following additional hint:

  • x-phosh-fb-profile: The feedback profile to use for events associated with this notification. See the Feedback Theme Specification for details. The additional value none is used to indicate that the event that would be triggered should be suppressed and hence no feedback emitted to the user.