ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Roberto Alsina <roberto.alsina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Michal Suchanek <hramrach@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
I see we are back to sarcasm.


> 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.
>
>
Well, you are wrong. You don't need a touch device, you don't need any
emulation. You do need to be connected to the Internet to download the app.
You do need a U1 account to download it from the store. But you can
write a script to download it without a device. It's probably 30 lines of
code.


> > 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 ..
>
>
No. You need to have had a general computing device capable of running
software in
it, connected to some sort of internet access system at some point in the
past in order
to download a file.

Then you have a click file. Which you can install. From the phone's SD
card. In the phone. Without any 3rd party apps. Using the terminal. That
comes with the phone.


> 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?
>
>
It's also possible today. You have not really tried, have you?