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Project Prism: on the road to building an open smartphone

James Livesey on April 06, 2022

That's right ⁠— we're on an ambitious plan to build an open smartphone that puts Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) at the core of our ecosystem. Check ou...
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Liviu Lupei

This is insane! Can't wait to see the next posts.

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James Livesey

Thank you! It's certainly an ambitious project of ours, but hopefully, we'll be able to provide updates with regards to the development of our project soon!

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Gert

That's looking bloody amazing James !!!
Q: So using PWA technology, that still means all the apps running on your Prism need to be developed using your tools. Not possible to install/run existing apps, like Twitter that you are mentioning...
Keep up the AMAZING work James

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Gert

I wonder if you could post builds for the PinePhone (Pro) occasionally, so we can play with it and possibly help debug, or do/can we build and load on phone.
Just super interested in what you're doing James !!

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James Livesey

Hey Gert, thanks for your support! With regards to PWAs, any website can theoretically become an app for the Prism (it'll be added to the home screen and will act like an app). Websites with a Web App Manifest will also have extra features, such as being able to work offline, too — since Twitter has a manifest, it will essentially act like a native app!

Build-wise, it's certainly something we're looking forward to release — a few features (such as some kind of update mechanism!) would probably be needed to be added, but I'm sure we can release an early Alpha build fairly soon!

Of course, the PinePhone I have is non-Pro, but I should imagine that there's some sort of build compatibility with Pros I hope... Something I'll have to check!

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Gert

Great, can't wait
Yes a build for the Pro would be amazing please
Cheers
Gert

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SVGator

Best of luck with your project!

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James Livesey • Edited

Thanks! From where we are at so far, it seems to be going really well, and development has come a long way in such a short space of time! Fingers crossed we'll be able to share some more dev updates here sometime soon...

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Ben Halpern

Whoa!

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James Livesey

Thanks for checking my post out, Ben! This isn't your typical software-development-oriented type of post on dev.to, but I'm sure many people will appreciate both the software and hardware side in developing a smartphone platform...

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Tawhid

Can't wait to listen more from you guys!

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James Livesey

Hopefully more should be on the way soon! There's already a few bug fixes and features that have been added since the video, so hopefully we should be able to provide an update at some point!

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James Livesey

Thanks Leonid!

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AquaDrehz

This project is so cool.
But I have a couple of questions.

  1. If your phone OS is a PWA then does another web can try to get your credential easier?

2 Does Prism Project is able to run the web automation framework to test itself?
Such as Cypress or Robot framework

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Leandro Freue (Lean Freue)

Hi James, i was reading about your project and i think it's great! But i see that's two years old, are you still working on it?

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Kevin J. Estevez

Awesome work! I can't wait to have one in my hands and test it

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tramcrazy

Thanks! We've been working really hard on this first version, an alpha should be ready soon!

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Mason Marper

Thanks for sharing