Phosh 2025 in retrospect

Posh, GNOME’s mobile shell, published a look back on the project’s 2025.

The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback. This year showed improvements in some important areas people rely on like cell broadcasts and emergency calls, further improving usability and starting some ground work we’ll need for some upcoming features.

↫ Phosh developers

In 2025, Posh gained support for cell broadcasts – like the emergency messages regarding storms, or alerts about missing persons, that sort of stuff – which is a pretty important feature in this day and age. Posh also improved its support for per-source audio volumes and one source of audio muting another, its on-screen keyboard, its compositor, and much more.

Of course, the main problem for shells like Phosh is hardware support, which is handled by the underlying operating system, like PostmarketOS. These Linux mobile operating systems are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to hardware support, and while Android application support can fill some of the application shortcomings, you’re going to be making pretty significant concessions by switching to mobile Linux at the moment. When even Android ROMs not sanctioned by Google are having issues with banking applications or government ID stuff, using mobile Linux will be even more of a problem.

None of this is the fault of any of the people dedicating their free time to things like Phosh or PostmarketOS, of course – it’s just a sad reality of a market we once again just gave up to a few megacorporations, with our governments too cowardly to stand up and fix this issue.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/144161/phosh-2025-in-retrospect/