Jonas Dressler of the GNOME Project has published a status report on the adoption of the GNOME Shell for smartphones. To carry out the work, a grant was received from the German Ministry of Education as part of the support for socially significant program projects.
It is noted that adaptation for smartphones is facilitated by the fact that recent releases of GNOME have a certain basis for working on small touch screens. For example, there is a customizable application navigation interface that supports arbitrary drag&drop rearrangement and multi-page layout. Screen gestures are already supported, such as the swipe gesture for changing screens, which are close to the control gestures needed on mobile devices. On mobile devices, you can also use many of the GNOME concepts used on the desktop, such as the quick settings block, the notification system, and the on-screen keyboard.
As part of the GNOME mobile adaptation project, the developers set out a roadmap for the development of functionality and prepared working prototypes of the home screen, application launcher interface, search engine, on-screen keyboard, and other core concepts. However, specific related features such as unlocking the screen with a PIN code, receiving calls while the screen is locked, emergency calls, flashlight, etc. are not yet covered. Smartphone is used as a platform for testing developments Pinephone Pro.
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