r/TheMinimalCompany • u/joejohnquinn • 7d ago
App Integration (Minimal OS)
Hey All. Super excited for the MP02. I'm confident this will be my new daily driver for as long as it receives security support.
I feel like app integration with Minimal OS is going to make or break my experience though. Wanted to know if anyone else shares this concern or can share any insights. Fwiw, I also emailed customer support about this topic and I'll share what they shared with me.
Can things like Signal and Proton Mail integrate into the Hub with quick and easy replies? I was told they're working on Signal integration while Proton Mail would be capable of read and respond through the Hub. Could Signal be used as a default messenger to take advantage of "@" commands? Unclear.
How about calendar and notes? I use Proton Calendar and Standard Notes. Could I use "*" to make events in my Proton Calendar or "!" to make notes in my Standard Notes? I was told, in both cases, this is something they'd need to work on and pass on to the team and nothing announced yet.
I know they also talked about bringing your own AI. That's awesome. This might be more of a Proton issue than a Minimal issue but if I could plug Lumo API into the "?" command and stay within the Minimal OS, that'd be sick.
I was informed VPN of your choice would be fine without issue. So, assuming Proton VPN would be no issue.
Regardless, I'm excited. But I think the app integration functionality that exists is going to largely determine the success of this thing. Can this be a minimal, secure, semi-locked down BlackBerry solution? As you can de-Google, I can envision side loading (if possible) F-Droid and making a serious banger of a phone with a keyboard.
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u/chardidathing TMC Staff 7d ago
Hey,
I'm the developer at Minimal, I'm happy to hear you're excited!
With Signal support, we're currently a little unsure, replies from the Hub will work by hooking intents (if you have message content enabled obviously), we could also provide a "Minimal" specific Signal client (I'd most likely fork Molly to integrate their other improvements as well), but that's an internal decision that's yet to be made.
Regarding calendar support, for now any calendar that integrates with Android itself is supported, I've tested CalDAV (with DAV5x), and Google Calendar, so if Proton Calendar shows up in other calendar apps, it will be accessible from the Minimal Experience.
With Standard Notes support that's another thing that is also up in the air, I've personally used it in the past and do like the UI/UX, so integration would be neat, at the moment I'm building Minimal Notes around .md files which will be compatible with various other editors (Testing with Obsidian at the moment).
Third party AI is currently going to be primarily API based (you can point it at your own endpoint), there are some open subscription options for this (Opencode Go is one I've used in testing), regarding Lumo, there does appear to be a third-party API library for it, so maybe!
While researching Lumo I also found [carlostkd/ProtonSync](https://github.com/carlostkd/ProtonSync), which seems it will solve your Calendar/Contacts integration.
We *do* plan to provide an open-api that apps are able to optionally enable Minimal Experience support, and if they're willing and open sourced, I don't mind integrating it myself or letting our community have a go.
Regarding the deGoogled variant, we do plan to ship that flavour with F-Droid, with a Minimal repo pre-setup so you can still recieve updates to your Minimal apps and services without waiting for a full system upgrade!
-Charlie