The Simplicity of Making Librem 5 Apps

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François Téchené

Director of Product

Latest posts by François Téchené (see all)

• Replacing the Screen of Your Librem 5 - January 25, 2024
• Working with the Librem 14 - November 22, 2023
• Introducing the Liberty Phone - June 30, 2023

Getting started with developing applications for a mobile platform can be a challenging task, especially when it comes to building and testing the application on the mobile device itself.

The Librem 5 makes its application development workflow extremely simple.

• You don’t need to worry about registering a developer account with some parent company.
• You don’t need to register your testing devices and ask the permission to a parent company just to be able to build and run your applications on those devices.
• You don’t need to “Jailbreak” your devices in order to access some restricted software or hardware features.
• And the best part is that you don’t need to worry about cross platform compiling because you can use the development tools directly on the phone.

The “quick start” video below that I made for the Librem 5 developers documentation demonstrates how quickly you can get up and running with making your own GTK applications on a Librem 5.

In this video, I have attached a Librem 5 to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor through a USB-C hub, and I use GNOME Builder to quickly create a new GTK application project, build it and run it on both the big desktop monitor and the small mobile screen with just a drag and drop across the screens.

Yes, I do all that with the computing power of the Librem 5 only! There are no special effects nor a hidden desktop computer. I even did the screencast recording with an external device so it shows the real speed of the Librem 5 when driving a 32″ Full HD monitor.