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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