What ships on the phone, and what each one is for. The list itself lives in one
place — depends in pkgbuilds/moarchy-meta/PKGBUILD (docs/structure.md P5)
— and this file is the readable half of it: the apps, what they are, and the
criteria the terminal, the web apps and the camera are held to.
Keeping it true. An app that joins or leaves that depends moves a row
here in the same commit. Names without versions, deliberately: a version in a
table goes stale in silence and a package name does not.
Everything below runs on a Google Pixel 3a (sargo) — SDM670, 4 GB RAM,
1080×2220 at scale 3, so a 360×740 logical screen. Screenshots are
straight off the device via grim, uncropped, so the bar is visible in each
one. Some were taken on the PinePhone this project shipped on until
2026-09-19, at 360×720; they are the same logical width and are not retaken
for the extra twenty rows.
Rows marked † are in the set but have not been launched on the device yet. They are there on availability and fit; the dagger comes off when someone has seen one run and taken a screenshot.
The phone UI is a set of Quickshell plugins the shell already holds, so
summoning one is a window becoming visible rather than a process starting.
They ship in moarchy, in the same plugin tree as the shell's own surfaces
(docs/structure.md B6), and are enabled by the packaged shell.json.
ui.catalog is a kit review window and is not in that package.
| App | Plugin | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Calculator | moarchy.calculator |
The four operations, a tape, and arithmetic that counts in tens |
| Calendar | moarchy.calendar |
The month, the day under it, and what is next. Local, no accounts |
| Clock | moarchy.clock |
Alarms, stopwatch, timer |
| Contacts | moarchy.contacts |
A name, a number, an email, a note. One JSON file, no accounts |
| Files | moarchy.files |
One folder at a time. $mod+f opens it |
| Keep | moarchy.keep |
Notes and checklists. Same notes.json the GTK app writes |
| Mail † | moarchy.mail |
One account over IMAP and SMTP: folders, reading, replying, forwarding. No HTML is drawn and no picture is fetched. New mail in the Inbox is looked for every fifteen minutes with the window closed, through moarchy-mail, one short run of Python at a time |
| Messages † | moarchy.messages |
Texts by person, written to one file before they are deleted from the modem. SMS only |
| Phone † | moarchy.phone |
A keypad, recents with the missed calls in red, and the call screen. It rings with its window closed, because the shell keeps it loaded |
| Text Editor † | moarchy.editor |
One text file at a time, what a tapped text file opens in, and $EDITOR through moarchy-editor --wait |
| Vitals | moarchy.vitals |
Processor, memory, tasks, network, from /proc |
| Weather | moarchy.weather |
Now, today and the week, for places you typed |
| Coins | moarchy.coins |
Top hundred by market cap, and the ones you star |
| Habits | moarchy.habits |
A tap a day, a streak, sixteen weeks of history |
| Launches | moarchy.launches |
Upcoming rockets: a countdown, a pad, the ones you star |
| Minesweeper | moarchy.minesweeper |
A portrait board and a latching flag |
| Reversi | moarchy.reversi |
A board drawn for 360px, an opponent on a clock |
| Noughts and crosses | moarchy.tictactoe |
The game solved at startup, then told to err |
| App | Package | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Store | moarchy-store-git |
Install and remove packages against a signed catalogue |
| foot | foot |
The terminal, and the only one — see One terminal |
Device sits in the app drawer beside these and is not an app: it is a screen the
shell already holds, with a desktop entry that toggles a plugin
(default/omarchy/plugins/moarchy.device/). It earns the slot because nothing
else on the phone shows thermals, memory or storage, and there is no settings
row that opens it.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth had entries of their own and no longer do. They are settings, not apps, and they were already reachable two other ways — a long press on the control center's tile, and the Wi-Fi networks / Bluetooth devices rows under Network & internet, which the app drawer's own search field returns for "wifi" or "bluetooth". A third copy in the app grid bought nothing and cost two cells in the first screenful. Settings and Themes never had an entry either — they open from the control center.
These reflow to a phone width natively and are the most comfortable fit.
| App | Package | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Maps | gnome-maps |
Adaptive; reflows to 360px like the rest of the set |
| Web | epiphany |
The browser — see Browsers |
Email was Geary until 2026-09-16, and is Mail under Ours now.
gnome-keyring stays, and stays above anything that depends on the virtual
org.freedesktop.secrets: Geary did, and while moarchy-meta listed it first,
pacman resolved the name before anything in the transaction provided it and
installed the alphabetically first provider, chipass, with a tile of its own
in the app drawer. image/verify.sh fails an image that has it.
KDE's mobile apps are the other family designed for this form factor, and they run without a KDE session — they are ordinary Wayland clients under Sway.
| App | Package | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Keysmith | keysmith |
TOTP / 2FA codes |
| App | Package | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Megapixels | megapixels |
The camera, and the only one that works here — see Camera. From [danctnix] |
| Linux Command Library | lcl-gui-bin |
Qt6 command reference and cheat sheets, useful on a device whose terminal is 47 columns. Built from the pin in manifest.toml; not in ALARM |
Calls and texts are Phone and Messages, under Ours. What they
run on has no UI of its own: modemmanager, which they reach through mmcli
and a gdbus monitor on the system bus, and callaudiod for earpiece, speaker
and mute during a call. Neither needs a unit of ours. The shell keeps both
plugins loaded, so the shell is the daemon that GNOME Calls and Chatty each
needed a replacement systemd unit for.
Two web apps ship as well — X and Discord, entries rather than packages. See Web apps.
This is where the hardware is genuinely comfortable, and it is the Omarchy idiom anyway. Two measured constraints shape it:
- A terminal is 47×41 characters at font size 9.
- btop refuses to draw below 60 columns, whatever
shown_boxessays.
So moarchy-launch-tui opens TUIs at font size 7, which is ~60 columns. The
window is an ordinary tiled one: the bar anchors top and the keyboard anchors
bottom, so neither costs a column, and a fullscreened terminal only bought a few
rows in exchange for hiding both. For something that fits at the default font
size, use btm (bottom) — it adapts, and shows CPU, memory, all three
thermal zones, disks and network.
Also installed and worth knowing: lazygit, bluetui, s-tui (CPU
frequency/temperature graphs).
htop and wiremix were here and are not any more. Three process viewers was
two too many and htop had nothing the other two do not — and the audio mixer
was replaced by Settings' own two screens well before it was removed from the
set. Both install in one command if you want them back.
Wi-Fi is not a TUI. The control center's tile and Settings both open moarchy.wifi,
a touch screen with a passphrase field — see docs/control-center.md S6b.
nmtui-connect still works from a terminal, but its buttons cannot be pressed
with a finger. impala looks like the wifi TUI to reach for and is wrong twice
over: its buttons have the same problem, and it is an iwd client on a phone
running NetworkManager with iwd.service disabled — iwd is D-Bus activatable,
so impala starts it to fight NetworkManager for wlan0 rather than failing
cleanly.
Every name below is available for aarch64 and left out on purpose.
sudo pacman -S <name> installs any of it; the reasoning per name is the
commented block at the foot of pkgbuilds/moarchy-meta/PKGBUILD.
| Package | Why not |
|---|---|
alacritty, qmlkonsole |
The second and third terminals, dropped 2026-09-08 — One terminal |
kclock, index-fm |
A second clock and a second file manager, dropped 2026-09-06. Index drags the whole MauiKit stack in behind it |
gnome-clocks, kalk, calindori, gnome-contacts, portfolio-file-manager, kweather |
Replaced 2026-09-15 by the moarchy.* shell plugins. gnome-contacts writes evolution-data-server, which Calls and Chats resolved names through; Phone and Messages read the Contacts plugin's file instead, so nothing on the image needs it any more. It installs from the store |
gnome-calls, chatty, mmsd-tng |
Replaced 2026-09-16 by moarchy.phone and moarchy.messages, daemons included. Installing Chatty back beside Messages is worse than a second tile: while it runs it takes every text off the modem and deletes it, so Messages never sees one. mmsd-tng was Chatty's MMS transport, and Messages is SMS only |
gnome-text-editor |
Replaced 2026-09-16 by moarchy.editor, as the app drawer's editor, the handler for text files and $EDITOR. It still does a great deal the plugin does not — tabs, search, highlighting, spell check — and installs from the store; omarchy-default-editor gnome-text-editor makes it the editor again |
geary |
Replaced 2026-09-16 by moarchy.mail. moarchy-store's sweep had already rejected it for this screen — a desktop-shaped three-pane client that wants an unlocked keyring, whose prompt maps behind its own window — and it is not in the store. sudo pacman -S geary still installs it. Mail keeps its password in a 0600 file, not the keyring, so the two do not share an account |
loupe, papers, foliate, secrets |
Dropped 2026-09-16 with no plugin in their place. The default set is the shell's own apps and what a phone cannot be a phone without; an image viewer, a PDF viewer, an e-book reader and a KeePass client are each a tap away in the store. Until one is installed, a picture, PDF or .epub tapped in Files has no handler of its own |
chipass |
Never listed, and installed anyway: Geary's org.freedesktop.secrets resolved to it while gnome-keyring came after geary in the list. See GNOME |
moarchy-keep, moarchy-vitals |
The GTK halves of Keep and Vitals. The plugins are the same apps (same notes file, same /proc reader) and two tiles for one job is the cut this list has been making since kclock |
spot-client |
Spot, a native Spotify client over librespot — the reason there is no Spotify web app here (B3) |
chromium, signal-desktop, libreoffice-fresh, nautilus, mpv, imv, kdenlive, gpu-screen-recorder |
Each is heavy for a phone SoC; none is needed for the phone to be a phone |
waydroid |
Android in an LXC container, and packaged as moarchy-waydroid since 0.4.0 — but still not a dependency: waydroid init pulls about a gigabyte on first run, and a default image should not commit a fresh phone to that. sudo pacman -S moarchy-waydroid installs it. See android.md |
Availability is not the constraint. Essentially the whole desktop catalogue is built for aarch64 in Arch Linux ARM — Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Signal, Telegram all install fine. Three other things decide whether an app is usable:
- A 360×720 logical screen. Desktop layouts do not reflow. The apps that work are the ones designed to adapt — GNOME's libadwaita apps and KDE's Kirigami/Plasma Mobile apps. Both families were built for phones, which is why the set above is drawn from exactly those two.
- 2 GB of RAM. Electron and Chromium will run and will hurt.
*-binAUR packages are usually dead. They ship prebuilt x86_64 binaries by definition.braincup-bin, for example, shipsBraincup-3.5.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gzand has no source PKGBUILD — there is nothing to rebuild for ARM. Check for a non--binpackage before assuming an app is available.
Long-press an icon in the app drawer. The card that opens says what the app is
and which package it came from; Uninstall then shows what pacman would
actually take — every package in the transaction and the total size — before
anything runs, and Remove does it with no terminal and no prompt. The rules for
what may not go are gestures.md section L: the shell will not
uninstall itself, and nothing another installed package needs can be removed.
Everything in the tables above is in moarchy-meta's depends, so an upgrade
of that package pulls a removed app back in — pacman resolves an upgraded
package's dependencies. The card says so when it applies rather than letting it
be a surprise on the next pacman -Syu.
The phone shipped three until 2026-09-08, and they were not three choices so
much as one engine and two entries in the app drawer beside it:
bin/moarchy-launch-tui execs foot by name and pkgbuilds/moarchy declares
it, so every TUI, every agent window, the config editor and the removal prompt
were foot already. alacritty cost 7.75 MiB — eight times the other two
together — to be an OpenGL terminal on a GPU with nothing spare, that nothing
launched, and qmlkonsole's 935 KiB had won the xdg default by being the only
TerminalEmulator that claimed it, which is why omarchy-launch-about answers
Unknown option 'render'.
Verified on touch before the other two were dropped: foot turns a tap into a
left-button click (man 1 foot, TOUCHSCREEN), which is what the control center's TUI
cards already rely on.
T1 One terminal is installed. alacritty and qmlkonsole are not in the
package set, and nothing pulls them in behind it.
→ pacman -Qq foot succeeds; pacman -Qq alacritty qmlkonsole finds neither
T2 foot is the default terminal, and xdg-terminal-exec resolves rather
than hangs. Those are one fact, not two: the hang measured on 2026-09-07 was a
missing ~/.config/xdg-terminals.list, and that file is exactly what naming a
default writes. Until it existed, $mod+Return and bin/moarchy-launch-files
both hung on the first candidate in their own fallback chain.
→ omarchy-default-terminal prints foot, and xdg-terminal-exec --print-id
prints foot.desktop and exits 0 rather than timing out
T3 The app drawer shows one terminal, not three — and this one is already
true, which is why it is written down. foot ships foot.desktop,
footclient.desktop and foot-server.desktop, all three TerminalEmulator
and none of them NoDisplay, so dropping two packages looked like it would
leave three tiles behind. Upstream Omarchy hides both by id in
/usr/share/omarchy/default/omarchy/launcher.hides (btop is in there too),
which AppLibrary reads into configuredHiddenEntryIds. Nothing here
implements it; the criterion exists because a launcher.hides that loses those
lines is a regression nobody would look for.
→ omarchy-shell app-drawer entries holds foot and holds neither footclient
nor foot-server
A
NoDisplaycopy in~/.local/share/applicationswas written to do this job and then deleted, because measuring it showed it changed nothing — and the first measurement was broken in a way worth remembering.desktopHiddenEntryIdsis recomputed only onappsChanged, and removing aNoDisplayfile changes nothing inDesktopEntries.applications, so no rescan fires and the answer comes from a cache built while the masks existed. Cloningfootclient.desktop's bytes under a new id settled it: the clone appeared, so the filter is on the id.
T4 Settings offers the terminals that exist. The Alacritty choice row hides
itself, and the Install Alacritty row stops being permanently hidden and
becomes a live offer — the same rows, guarded the same way, answering a
different truth.
→ settings rowsOn apps.default.terminal holds foot and not alacritty;
settings rowsOn apps.packages.more holds alacritty
T5 The app drawer still refuses to remove the terminal. pkgbuilds/moarchy
declares foot, and it is now the only terminal there is to lose.
→ moarchy-app-remove plan foot reports a blocker (selftest L12a)
T6 Nothing seeds a config for a terminal that is not installed.
→ ~/.config/alacritty is not created, and moarchy-user-setup logs no
missing file for it
Epiphany (epiphany) is the one to reach for — WebKit, ~260 MB, and it has
a genuinely adaptive mobile layout with the URL bar at the bottom. Firefox and
Chromium both install and run, but cost far more memory for no layout benefit.
Heavy SPAs are the real problem, not the browser. x.com loads but paints poorly and leaves large black regions — that is the workload against a 1.15 GHz A53 and a GLES 2.0 GPU, not something configuration fixes.
A site a phone treats as an app: its own window with no browser chrome, its own
name and icon on its tile in the workspace overview, its own entry in the app drawer's grid.
Ids are B<n>.
B1 A web app opens as a window of its own site: no tab strip, no
bookmarks, no other site reachable from it, and its own cookies and login.
Epiphany's --application-mode is the equivalent of the --app= upstream's
launcher assumes, and it needs a --profile with it or every launch starts
logged out.
What it does not remove is Epiphany's own bottom bar — the site title, the
URL, back, forward and a ⋮ menu. There is no key for it: org.gnome.Epiphany.ui
offers only bottom-url-bar (where, not whether), and .lockdown disables
actions rather than chrome. Epiphany does hide it in the fullscreen state,
which is how the Hyprland sibling gets a bare window — its compositor can tell a
client it is fullscreen while still laying it out under the bar. Sway has no
fake fullscreen, and the real thing is ruled out by windows.md W5: a
fullscreen window on sway draws above the Top layer and ignores exclusive zones,
so it takes the status bar, the launch splash, and the band the on-screen
keyboard reserves. So the win here is the window and its identity (B2), not a
bare canvas.
→ launched from the app drawer, the window is Epiphany's web-app window: no tab
strip, and org.gnome.Epiphany.WebApp_<slug> is its own profile
B2 Each web app is its own window identity. The profile directory's
basename becomes the window's app id — org.gnome.Epiphany.WebApp_x_com — and
the entry names it in StartupWMClass, which is what gives its tile in the
workspace overview and the control center's notification card (control-center.md S25) a name and an icon
to take.
Without it a web app's card reads org.gnome.Epiphany.WebApp_x_com, and two
web apps sharing one profile would collapse into a single card.
→ swaymsg -t get_tree reports one app_id per web app, each matching its
entry's StartupWMClass; omarchy-shell workspace-overview windows names the app
B3 The app drawer carries X and Discord from first boot, with their own artwork. Both are upstream's own entries and upstream's own icons; nothing on this phone ever copied either into a place the app drawer or an icon theme reads, so the package installs them.
Not Spotify, which is where this parts company with the desktop and with
omarchy-mobile: there is no
Widevine for aarch64 Linux in any repo, so the web player answers "Playback
disabled" in every browser on this phone. Spotify here is Spot, a native
client over librespot, from the repo (manifest.toml, [aur.spot-client]).
Every other web app upstream ships an entry for — WhatsApp, YouTube, Zoom, the
Google ones — installs with omarchy-webapp-install and needs nothing from
this project.
→ omarchy-shell app-drawer entries lists X and Discord — the entries are
named by id, without the .desktop, like every other row
B4 The phone asks the web for a phone's version of itself. WebKitGTK's own
agent says X11; Linux aarch64, which is a desktop, and a site that branches
on the agent rather than on a media query serves one — the layout that is
clipped on the right in a 360px window. The override is the schema's default,
not a write into anyone's dconf, and org.gnome.Epiphany.web is relocatable,
so one stanza reaches the browser and every web app profile at once. A user
who wants one site back on the desktop layout overrides that profile's key.
An iPhone, not an Android: Epiphany is WebKitGTK, so a site that branches on
the agent should be handed the code it tests against WebKit rather than the
Blink path.
→ gsettings get "org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/" user-agent
names a Mobile agent. The path is not optional: the schema is relocatable, and
naming it without one answers "is relocatable (path must be specified)" rather
than a value — which is a check that fails for the wrong reason
B5 Installing a Chromium-family browser gets upstream's behaviour back.
The launcher's Chrome-family branch is upstream's, unchanged and first; only
the fall-through is ours. What it must never do is upstream's own ending,
which rewrites every non-Chrome browser to chromium.desktop and then execs a
command with no program in it when chromium is not installed — silently, which
is how every web app tile on this phone did nothing at all.
→ with no Chromium-family browser installed, omarchy-launch-webapp https://x.com/ still opens a window
Megapixels is the camera app, rebuilt here (pkgbuilds/megapixels) rather
than taken from a repo: the packaged build cannot load a colour profile at all,
which is devices.md D30's green preview.
The reason it works where nothing else does is libmegapixels, which reads a
device config describing the media graph and configures the links itself
before streaming. A generic app never does — which is the whole of the old
"VIDIOC_STREAMON fails — pipeline links unconfigured" entry, and why
snapshot and plasma-camera cannot work here at all.
megapixels-findconfig auto-detects the device config from the devicetree.
Amended 2026-09-19. The table and the measurements below were taken on the PinePhone, whose sensors were an
ov5640and agc2145behindsun6i-csi. They are kept as the record of how this was worked out; what ships now is a Pixel 3a, whose cameras and colour profiles are D30's subject. The mechanism above is what carried over unchanged, which is the point.
| Sensor | Flash | Modes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rear | ov5640 |
LED, /sys/class/leds/white:flash/flash_strobe |
2592×1944@15, 1280×720@30 (BGGR8 / YUYV) |
| Front | gc2145 |
screen | 1280×720@60 BGGR8 |
The camera switch was confirmed against the media graph rather than by eye —
tapping it flips which sensor link to sun6i-csi-bridge is [ENABLED].
Three things bite:
xdg-user-dirsis required, andmegapixelsdoes not declare it. Without it~/Picturesnever exists and every photo is captured and then silently thrown away at the last step — the burst goes to/tmpfirst, so the failure appears only after the shutter animation and the app reports nothing.moarchy-metadeclares it; a hand-built system has to add it.- The flash permission does not survive a reboot on its own. The shipped
90-megapixels.ruleschmodsflash_strobeonACTION=="add"only, and the LED is added at boot before the rule exists.moarchy-led-perms.servicerunsudevadm trigger --subsystem-match=ledsaftersystemd-udevdon every boot rather than editing someone else's udev rule. - The preview can be software-rendered, by Megapixels' own choice. It
matches the devicetree and may force
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1, which puts the GLES preview on the CPU. Worth checking per device rather than assuming.
Unverified: video recording. Megapixels ships movie.sh → mpegize.py, which
is GStreamer x264enc speed-preset=ultrafast into ~/Videos/VID*.mkv, and it
needs python-gobject, gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-ugly, none of
which megapixels declares (they are moarchy-meta's optdepends).
| Microphone | Records digital silence (RMS 0) at PipeWire and raw ALSA, despite Mic1 on, boost 7, ADC 144/192 and AIF1 Slot 0 Digital ADC enabled. This is what stops SongRec's headline feature |
| Works as of 2026-09-06 — see Camera. It still reboots the phone on the first launch after a boot; second and later launches are fine, and the cause is undiagnosed | |
| Audio output | Works |
| Hardware video decode | cedrus present at /dev/video1, unexplored |
See build-log.md for how the device was set up and what else is
known-broken.