As you may have noted if you have recently upgraded to Pinephone or Librem Phone, there are currently some missing spots as far as good and well built mobile apps for the platform. While this affords great opportunity for the first folks to build apps to profit from this growing segment, we also should encourage local app makers to fix their apps to work on Linux/Librem Phone!
One unfortunate issue in the development and marketing of any software product is that folks often do not know what the end user actually wants in the app. Even with Sentry installed in the code, one can see product bugs/defects that no one would bother to email a report to, but they won’t likely note other things that are odd or missing or features wanted.
When you are browsing the Librem app store and don’t find an app you want, that you have used on your previous Android/iOS phone, browse to https://play.google.com/store and find the app you want. At the bottom of the page under “Developer”, copy the email address.
Now compose an email roughly in this template, and send it to the developer:
Greetings,
Thank you for developing [APP], which I have recently used on my [ANDROID] phone. I am switching to [LIBREM/Pinephone] which takes native Linux apps. Can you please point me to how I may install the Linux Port of [APP] please?
I couldn’t find the Linux version of [APP], this will be needed for a growing number of users of Linux based phones, as well as Ubuntu/Linux laptops, Raspberry Pi, and other computers would be able to use [APP] if a Linux build were made available.
Thank you for your time
[NAME]