TL;DR: Download from the App Store on an iOS >= 14 device!
This project is the iOS version of the group of applications called KDE Connect, which uses the LAN network to integrate devices together. For information on KDE Connect, check out:
If you would like to talk to the KDE Connect developers & contributors (for questions or if you would like to contribute!), please join the KDE Connect development Telegram channel.
In addition to the App Store, you can also get the public testing version of KDE Connect iOS by opening this TestFlight link. This version also supports running on Macs with Apple silicon.
- iOS is very much designed around foreground interactions. Therefore, background “daemon-style” applications don’t really exist under conventional means, so the behavior where KDE Connect iOS is unresponsive in the background is more or less intended. There are technically some special categories and "hacky" methods to try to get it to run in the background, but in general, there is no intended/by-design method of keeping a "daemon-style" app running forever in the background. For more information, see this post on the Apple Dev Forums
- Notification syncing doesn't work because iOS applications can't access notifications of other apps
Please feel free to give feedback about/report bugs in the TestFlight version through:
- System Settings app: you can report general information such as the number of app launches and crashes by enabling Settings > Privacy > Analytics & Improvements > Share iPhone Analytics > Share with App Developers
- TestFlight's integrated screenshot feedback system: upon taking a screenshot of the app, tap "export" to see an option to send it as feedback to the developer (us)
- TestFlight's integrated crash feedback system: upon app crashing, an alert will appear asking you if you would like to send the crash data along as feedback
- KDE Bugzilla
- If you don't send ANY feedback AND have "Share with App Developers" disabled, the ONLY information that the KDE developers can access about you is the date that you've installed the TestFlight app.
- Enabling "Share with App Developers" discloses general information such as the number of app launches and crashes with the KDE Connect developers.
- Sending feedback through TestFlight's integrated screenshot feedback system OR TestFlight's integrated crash feedback system will disclose:
- User email (if chosen to disclose)
- Device model
- iOS version
- Battery level
- Cellular carrier (if applicable)
- Time zone
- Architecture
- Connection type (Wifi, etc.)
- Free space on disk and total disk space available
- Screen resolution
- (For Crash feedback) stack trace leading to crash
- Sending feedback through KDE Bugzilla lets you manually disclose as much or as little information as you would like, but all information will have to be investigated manually.
We keep track of tasks for KDE Connect iOS using Phabricator and accept changes through KDE Invent GitLab merge requests.
Many tasks only include a high level description and could be easily misinterpreted, so we'd recommend first starting a conversation in the task you are interested in implementing with your high level plan before diving into coding. Especially since KDE Connect iOS 2021 makes heavy use of both Swift and Objective-C and needs to support multiple iOS versions, it can be a bit confusing at first, so feel free to ask the developers some questions!
- Expand to a watchOS companion/standalone app?
- Expand to macOS with catalyst/native SwiftUI?
This project is a continuation of KDE Connect 2014, a codebase that stemmed from the Google Summer of Code 2014 program that remained largely untouched since 2014 until getting picked up again by Inoki in 2019, where some tweaks were added to it to support TLS.
KDE Connect 2021 was started as a project for Google Summer of Code 2021 by student Lucas Wang. As of mid-August 2021, the app compiles and is able to perform all of the functionalities currently implemented (though there are likely some bugs to be found). Currently, the app is not yet ready for Release distribution as it lacks certain functionalities compared to the other KDE Connect versions that either need to be implemented or are likely unviable to implement due to iOS restrictions.
If you would like to check out some other posts about KDE Connect iOS, please see:
- Lucas's blog contains many articles covering technical overviews of this project as well as its origin and plans for the future
- Lucas's Google Summer of Code Status Report is another place to view a report of this project
If you get the error Plug-in ended with uncaught signal: 4 whent trying to run SwiftLint as part of the build, run the following command:
sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer