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The setup described in this page is still a proposal. It works, but is not yet adopted as "the official way".

Plasma Mobile application development

This page will guide your through creating a properly packaged Plasma Mobile app. We will use the KDE flatpak SDK to develop and package the app, so all that is required is a working flatpak and flatpak-builder installation.

On Debian and derivates, you can use sudo apt install flatpak flatpak-builder.

Using the Kirigami application template

First, clone the app template: git clone https://gitlab.com/jbbgameich/plasma-mobile-app-template.git

This repository can be used as a template to develop Plasma Mobile applications. It already includes templates for the qml ui, a c++ part, app metadata and flatpak packaging.

Local building and testing using the SDK

flatpak install flathub org.kde.Sdk//5.11 # Only needs to be done once
flatpak-builder flatpak-build-desktop --force-clean --ccache *.json
flatpak-builder --run flatpak-build-desktop *.json hellokirigami

Creating a flatpak for the phone

This assumes your system is already set up as described here. Make sure your system also supports qemu user emulation. If not, you can find help for example here

flatpak install flathub org.kde.Sdk/arm/5.11 # Only needs to be done once
flatpak-builder flatpak-build-phone --repo=arm-phone --arch=arm --force-clean --ccache *.json
flatpak build-bundle arm-phone app.flatpak org.kde.hellokirigami

Now your app is exported into app.flatpak. You can copy the file to the phone using scp:

scp app.flatpak [email protected]:/home/phablet/app.flatpak

ssh [email protected]
flatpak install app.flatpak

Your new application should now appear on the homescreen.

Using the template to develop your application

Edit the files to fit your naming and needs. In each command, replace “io.you.newapp” and “newapp” with the id and name you want to use

find . -name "CMakeLists.txt" -or -name "*.desktop" -or -name "*.xml" -or -name "*.json" -exec sed -i 's/org.kde.hellokirigami/io.you.newapp/g;s/hellokirigami/newapp/g' {} \;

for file in $(find . -name "org.kde.hellokirigami*"); do mv $file $(echo $file | sed "s/org.kde.hellokirigami/io.you.newapp/g"); done

Submitting your new application to the repository

Once your application is working and is usable, you can submit a patch to include it into the KDE flatpak repository.

After setting up git with the recommended KDE settings, you can create a new file io.you.newapp.remoteapp in the flatpak-kde-applications repository.

git clone kde:flatpak-kde-applications && cd flatpak-kde-applications

Paste the following content into the file:

ID=io.you.newapp
JSON=io.you.newapp.json
GITURL=https://gitlab.com/you/newapp.git

You can now submit the patch on Phabricator. Once accepted, your app will be automatically built, published and made available in Discover (if the KDE flatpak repository is enabled on the device).