Having had our third meetup in the Datenburg hackspace in Bonn, it’s time to report and share our experiences. As announced this meeting was rather informal without many items on the “official” agenda. Of course this does not mean we didn’t get things done! Throughout the event we were usually around 8 people: We had participants from Czechia and different areas in Germany. The space would allow for a few more people, maybe you’d like to swing by next time!

The first FairTech Summit Europe took place in Luxembourg last week. It was a one day event, organized by Mobifree and Fair✦Tec, bringing together people from different projects that work towards removing dependencies on big tech and unethical technologies from our digital lives. The digital poster wall gives an impression about the breadth of topics covered. There was a wide spectrum of interesting talks, not only about technical implementations but also on user acceptance, collaboration and how we can hopefully scale out to reach more people.

Members of Phosh.mobi e.V. attended the first postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference in Aachen. It was the first conference in this format but nevertheless very well prepared with an interesting schedule. There was even breakfast at the conference which is a nice way to meet people early over a coffee and a vegan sandwich. Four members from our association attended, and we had one talk about Phosh and BengalOS on the main track.

Members of Phosh.mobi e.V. attended the MiniDebconf in Winterthur in August. The Debian project builds a universal operating system for desktops, laptops, servers and phones. As with almost everything in the Debian project, these conferences are completely self-organized by project members and, with more than 100 attendees, are not quite as “mini” as they might sound. Four days of DebCamp (with hacking and Debian-related topics and socializing) were followed by two days of conference talks.

We’d like to invite our members as well as everyone interested in Phosh, the Linux Mobile ecosystem, and the activities of Phosh.mobi e.V. to our third iteration of the Phosh Hackspace Meetup in the Datenburg in Bonn from 2026-10-09 (~18:00) to 2026-10-11 (~18:00). This will be an informal meeting and less structured than our Phosh Contributors Meeting 2026. This will be our third event in this local hackspace! Thanks to them for hosting us again!

FrOSCon is an annual, two-day conference covering Free Software and Open Source topics, held at the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin. It has multiple talk tracks as well as a booth area where different projects can present themselves. In contrast to previous years we didn’t have a dev room with talks but instead had a booth to present Phosh and our association’s activities. We brought the same set of devices we had at CLT26 but the functionality had improved considerably since then, with more devices having working cameras and reliable phone calls.

Our current financial situation made it possible to fund our first small research and development project 🥳, thanks a lot to our supporters! Gotam (a long-time contributor to Phosh-related projects) has taken on the task of implementing mobile data usage monitoring, an important feature for cost control. It will allow users to track their mobile data usage, helping them avoid running out of budget on metered connections. Similar to other Phosh-related projects like feedbackd, cellbroadcastd or our syncbus interface this feature will be implemented as a reusable service that can be shared with other Libre mobile environments, along with a Phosh-specific user interface component so that it is immediately useful to our users.

We recently held the Phosh Contributors Meeting 2026 in the Linuxhotel, Essen, Germany with contributors joining from India, Sweden, Czech Republic and Germany. It started on the evening of May 22nd and ended on the afternoon of May 24th. We’d like to thank all our supporters. Your donations made this event possible! Many thanks as well to all participants for making the trip and dedicating their weekend to the project.

As has been traditions for some time, this year too saw another wonderful MiniDebConf in Hamburg where some of our members attended. The week-long event consisted of plenty of hacking, discussions, workshop and presentations. But let’s start from the beginning. As there is only ever one (big) DebConf per year and (local) Debian people still have the desire to meet and hack, they self-organize smaller events for a couple of days or - in this case - a full week to exchange ideas, fix bugs, give presentations or just generally work on Debian.

As you may know from our announcement, members of Phosh.mobi e.V. were present at CLT 2026. Seeing the interest in breaking free from the current mobile duopoly was a total blast. Running a fully Free Software Linux system with Phosh as a touch- and mobile-friendly interface under users' control - not big tech’s - sparked a lot of excitement. Given this year’s motto, “Sovereign Digitality”, we expected some interest. What surprised us was that even people who (in their own words) have been fully immersed in the 🍏 ecosystem for 15 years considered alternatives after trying our demo phones for just a few minutes.

As you may know from our announcement, Phosh.mobi members were present at FOSDEM 2026. We had a great time in Brussels and with things in the rear-view mirror, let’s share some of our experiences from the event. Devroom As is tradition by now, we helped organize and run the FOSS on Mobile devroom, which took place on Saturday. And we’re happy to say that it was a great success! So much so, that the devroom was always packed with a queue of people outside itching to get in.

The dates for our 2026 Phosh contributors meeting (PCM) are now confirmed: Friday 22.05.2026 to Sunday 24.05.2026 17:00. Check our PCM 2026 page for more details and registration information. All Phosh contributors are invited and it would also be great to see people from the wider Linux Mobile ecosystem too. In case you want to help us fund the meeting see here.

We’re planning our first Phosh Contributors Meeting in 2026. We have plenty of interesting topics to work on, a location (the Linux Hotel) and a date option in May ‘26. Since we can’t cover such events from our association’s running budget yet we need to raise additional 2500 Euro to cover the costs for accommodation, food, conference room and (partially) travel costs for up to 15 people. Please consider donating until via the following form to help us to make that event happen.

We’d like to invite our members as well as everyone interested in Phosh and the activities of Phosh.mobi e.V. to our first online Phosh community get together on 2025-11-18 19:00 CET at https://ev.phosh.mobi/gettogether/ and to our next meeting in the Datenburg at 2025-12-04. Why an online meeting? While some of us meet at various conferences the members of our association are distributed over different countries which makes joining in person meetings hard to impossible.

As you may know from our previous post, we were present at GNU/LinuxDay Vorarlberg. While Phosh.mobi is already several years old and mature and we’ve talked about it before at conferences this was our first ever official booth representing the project as official nonprofit organization so reason enough to share our experiences: At 09:00 the event opened to the public and with one hour to go before the first talks most visitors started roaming, lots of them stopping by to chat and play with our OnePlus6, Librem5, x86 Tablet and Fairphone 5 demo devices.

Phosh.mobi e.V. will be present at this year GNU/LinuxDay Vorarlberg. We’ll have a booth where one can try out some phones running Phosh. We’ll bring T-shirts for sale and stickers too. There’ll also be two mobile related talks: one by Evangelos about Living 5 years with mobile Linux and one by Daniel Kulesz titled Mainline Linux on a smartphone - even today a good choice for end users?.

Phosh.mobi e.V. was present at this year FrOScon. We gave a short introduction into the why and how the e.V. came to be (slides) followed by the annual Phosh community get together. It was nice to meet so many people from our community in person again and to discuss Phosh and MobileLinux. Hopefully ’til next year! Photo credits: Leandro Friedrich

As e.V. one of our aims is to ensure that Phosh remains Free Software. In order to be able to defend any possible claims in the future it is now possible to assign Phosh.mobi e.V. as fiduciary. This is by no means a requirement to contribute to Phosh but if you consider it useful, you can do it now. We opted for this variant developed by the FSFE as its goals align very much with what we had in mind:

Whenever we had Phosh community get togethers or meetups, discussions usually came to a point where we wished for a “more official” place to have users and developers come together in order to exchange ideas and collaborate on improving Linux based mobile phone use, make it more known to the public and plan ahead. So at the very end of February 2025 parts of the community came together and founded an association under German law called Phosh.