The Phosh team has announced the release of Phosh 0.57, the latest major update to the mobile shell designed for Linux-powered smartphones and other touch-oriented devices.
Among the most visible changes is improved handling of landscape orientation. When the shell is unlocked and a device is rotated horizontally, Phosh uses a two-column layout for the top panel, making better use of the extra horizontal space on wider displays.
The developers have also added a new transition animation when moving from a running application to the overview. However, the feature remains disabled by default because further improvements are planned during the upcoming Phosh 0.58 development cycle.
Another notable part of the release is Phosh Mobile Settings 0.57, which introduces dedicated Wi-Fi, Cellular, Online Accounts, Network, and Bluetooth panels. These are based on counterparts from GNOME Control Center 50.4 and significantly expand the system settings handled directly through Phosh’s mobile-friendly settings application.
The settings application now lets users reset terminal shortcuts from the on-screen keyboard panel. The Updates panel also provides visual feedback when checking for available updates after being opened.
Stevia, Phosh’s on-screen keyboard, has received improvements, including enhanced Japanese input support with a dedicated layout for Anthy, a new mode popover that provides access to additional input modes, and fixes for punctuation characters that previously could not be entered.
The terminal keyboard layout has been adjusted as well. The lowercase layout no longer uses smaller keys, and the Tab and Escape keys have been moved to the completion bar. Several European keyboard layouts now include additional punctuation characters, and a fix addresses text input problems with X11 applications.
On the compositor side, Phoc 0.57 has been updated to wlroots 0.20.2 and introduces support for the new phoc-foreign-toplevel-pidfd protocol. Phoc serves as the Wayland compositor used by Phosh and handles display, input, window management, and related lower-level functionality.
The mobile-friendly XDG Desktop Portal implementation has been updated. Its file chooser portal can now open multiple files at once when an application requests multi-file selection. The PFS file selector widget also supports selecting several files simultaneously.
The release additionally ships gmobile 0.7.3, which expands hardware support. The library now includes display panel support for Google’s Pixel 9a, while wakeup-key handling has been added for the Nothing Phone 1 and both LTE and Wi-Fi variants of the Juno Tablet 4.
Phosh 0.57 is based on GNOME 50 and wlroots 0.20.2, alongside updated components such as Calls 50.0, ModemManager 1.25.95, feedbackd 0.8.9, and mmsd-tng 2.6.4.
For more information, including individual component tarballs, checksums, signatures, and detailed change logs, refer to the official Phosh 0.57 release announcement.
Image credits: Phosh Project
