Finally, Signal on the PinePhone

Posted on 2022-05-01

I finally made it. I got some form of Signal working on the PinePhone. And with "some form", I mean a extremly feature-

lacking form of Signal, as you will see.

Idea

The idea basically was, that I do not need all features Signal provides most of the time, at least not on the PinePhone at this point in time. What I basically wanted is to receive messages from Signal, I can then look at the message and decide if it is worth replying on my Android-phone.

And this is basically the whole application. It just sits as a daemon and listens for new messages from Signal, and if a new message arrives, a notification will be sent.

Signal-notify

Coding this daemon was easier than I imagined. I really thought this would be hard as the library I use to interact with Signal, presage, is still considered unstable and absolutly not feature-complete yet.

presage

But it really was not hard, including imports, blank lines, logging and the like, the application only has a little bit over 80 lines of code. It was basically coded in maybe two hours (granted, I already looked at the library before).

Repositories

The git-repository is, like many of my previous projects, dual-hosted on both GitLab and SourceHut.

GitLab

SourceHut

Documentation on setting up the application can be found in the repositories READMEs.

Conclusion

This very simple (and still barely tested) application seems to do everything I wanted from it, for now. I can also see great potential in the usage of desktop machines. Nevertheless, I still thrive for a real GTK-application in the future, but as I do not have time to develop it now, this small daemon will suffice.

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