ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 15 October 2013 17:42, Martin Albisetti <argentina@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, you invest time into making this use case difficult and then say
that's not top use case so will not invest into making it easy.

Wouldn't it be easier to just not invest into making the use case
difficult in the first place?

Noo, then Canonical could not have control over users with One Store
To Rule Them All.

Oh well. I will see how this pans out but so far it's looking like you
will need an actual Touch device or an emulation somehow attached to
the net so you can download the click apps directly to the Touch
device or fake it somehow - just as sucky as Google store.

> 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.

But then for all practical purposes you have connected the phone to
the net - there is stuff like the USB Ethernet gadget or adb or ..

But do you have usually such stuff set up on your PC or a PC in an
internet cafe or Android device or dumb phone? No.
Do those devices manage to download to plain USB thumb drive? Yes.
Even my dumb phone can probably do that.

But installing click apps from plain storage would just be too simple
and useful, right?

Regards

Michal