Hello and welcome to our first annual report covering 2025 from our founding meeting in February up the end of the year. As the there will be a separate report focusing solely on software side improvements from 2025 here we won’t include any software side progress in this report.

Preparations, General Assemblies

Having an association to represent the Phosh community was something we wanted to do for several years. But it finally took shape in late 2024 when some of our future board members started to work on the initial draft of the by-laws and to look for an initial group of people that wanted to join as active members. In Germany you need at least seven people to initially form a registered association and we were very happy that these were relatively easy to find.

Together we then worked out the by-laws and held the founding meeting (our first general assembly) on the 27.2.2025 which also elected the board for two years. We then sent out the documents to the court for approval and afterwards to the tax authorities which requested some minor changes. This needed another general assembly to vote on the changes, another round trip with court and tax authorities and we finally got all the documents together in June and could make a public announcement that we are alive. We then held another short general assembly in August to approve the rules of procedure for the supporting membership.

All public institutions were very supportive and helped actively to get things going.

The board has been meeting every three months to execute the assemblies decisions and to prepare activities and reports like this one.

Activities

As you might imagine an important part was to set up infrastructure like our website, bank accounts, different payment providers, online collaboration tools, etc. We also moved most of the projects websites and web services to servers managed by the association and its members and translated website and documents to English as for a German association the legally binding documents need to be in German but we intend to be a diverse group of members including different nationalities.

Conferences

One of our goals is to inform about Linux and Phosh on mobile devices, the current developments, possible limitations and how we can replace the proprietary main stream. This includes learning from users and might be users about what works well for them and what can be improved.

We did that at several conferences like FrOSCon and Linuxday.at, the later also had a talk by Evangelos about his last 5 years with a Mobile Linux Smartphone. You can read up on the teams impressions here.

For these kind of events Romi designed and created some nice flyers to distribute to interested people and we built a (still growing) kit of equipment to use at these events which we sent around in a convenient rolling suitcase.

Get Togethers

In addition we started regular online get togethers as a place to ask questions, having an easy contact point to join the community but also to discuss topics that are hard to tackle in asynchronous communications. The next online get together will be at 2026-01-20.

We also had our 2nd offline get together at the Datenburg in Bonn, the first one in 2024 was before the association was officially founded.

Fiduciary Licensing Agreement

In order to be able to ensure that Phosh remains Free Software we implemented a optional Fiduciary Licensing Agreement that we offer to contributors so we’re able to define any possible future claims without having the contributors lose the right to their contributions. Several contributors already contributors already signed up for this.

Reaching out

Having a formal organization also allows us to reach out to organizations and companies to inform them about issues we see with the current mobile landscape and how to overcome them. We got some encouraging feedback in some places but also found others that don’t seem to worry that much about digital sovereignty for the devices we carry with us every day yet. We hope to be able to present some positive results from our outreach in 2026.

Improving the Linux Mobile Ecosystem

In order to further improve day to day usability we started preparations for our first Phosh Contributors Meeting which will give attendees two full days to discuss challenges and work on solving them. If you find this useful please consider joining us there or donating. For more details on the event see here.

Some of our members also currently help supervising a master thesis at the TU Bingen that analyses the onboarding documentation for app development in our ecosystem and how to possibly improve it.

For software side improvements in 2025 we’ll post a separate report here.

How are we doing?

Members

The growth in membership numbers exceeded our expectations. We doubled the number of active members after announcing the association publicly last summer and also had our first supporting members join and provide continuous financial support.

The board wants to thank the active members for their contributions, activities, input and discussions and the supporting members for their donations making our work possible. Thank you!

Finances

In total we received 3.322,26 € in donations and membership fees of supporting members. 555,00 € of this was earmarked by donors for the contributor meetings.

On the expenses side we spent 207,28 € for baseline costs (infrastructure & hosting, bank account, transaction fees for payment providers) and 178,59 € for information materials and booth equipment leaving a budget of 2.936,39 €.

The donations were from more than 50 different transactions from 31 different donors and most of them came via SEPA which is great as it minimizes transaction fees which would otherwise go to the big tech companies.

Given our estimated costs for our contributors meeting of 2.500 € the current budget will allow us to make that happen but in order to pick up more activities in 2026 we’d like to raise more money so please consider to support our calls for donations from time to time.

(The numbers above are up to the 18th of December).

Supporters

Thanks to our supporters in 2025, without you this wouldn’t be possible:

• Benedikt Wildenhain
• Guido Günther
• Manuel Traut
• Marko Hehl
• Matthew Panhans
• Matthias Kirschner u. K. Kütt
• Nicole Faerber
• Ondrej Kolin
• Thorsten Panknin
• 22 donors that want to remain private

If you want to join the group of financial supporters you can either become a supporting member or make a one time or recurring donation.

As we care about your privacy the above only lists donors by name that checked the “I’m o.k. with being listed as a donor” check box in the donation form. If you donated via other ways or forgot to tick the box, let us know and we happily update the list.