ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Martin Albisetti <argentina@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Rasmus Eneman <Rasmus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What Michal Suchanek tries to say is that he wants a way to install click
> apps from the store while not having internet access on the phone (ie.
> download it on a computer with internet access).
>
> A solution to this that I see is to have it possible to install phone apps
> to the phone from the software centre on the computer.
> What I mean is:
> Connect the phone to the computer (by usb for example)
> Launch Ubuntu Software Center
> Choose phone in some way (designers needed)
> Now the software centre shows phone apps instead of desktop apps.
> Allow the user to install any app (the apps get installed on the phone, not
> the computer)
>
> Could be a great feature actually.

Right. So while that is a use case, it certainly isn't top use case at
all for the majority of the users. It would be foolish for us to
invest time in something like that at this point.
That said, because authentication is simple (oauth signed request, the
source code to do so is open source), you can implement it yourself.
Write a script that searches the store, signs the URL, downloads it do
the desktop and sends it to the phone. This is what's different from
Android (and certainly iOS), there's no secret to how to authenticate
to the store, it's fully open source.
All our infrastructure on the server and on the phone support this,
anyone's welcome to write such a script to fit their use case.



> Maybe something to have in mind when the click framework is ported to the
> desktop?

At the moment, there's no plans on porting the click framework to the
desktop. That may change, but that's the current status. The primary
reason for that is that click packages don't have a human review
because they are safely confined with apparmor on Ubuntu Touch, which
uses Mir. On the current desktop version, which uses X, we can't
isolate apps as much as we would feel safe with, so it would introduce
more of a risk if we ported the click infrastructure by default in the
desktop version.


-- 
Martin