I really love how Mudita have shared their Mindful Design Framework, and are so engaged with the brilliant user-created apps that are shared here.
I know Mudita is a small team and has to prioritise what they work on, which is why I believe these user-created apps are essential to unlocking the full potential of the phone while keeping in with the minimalist aesthetic.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem like Kompakt owners who aren’t active on here or the subreddit would find out about these apps which would greatly improve their experience with the phone.
If you look at the Pebble Watch, another e-ink device made by a small team, they link to the Pebble store on their website and share about it quite prominently in their comms, so users can go and discover some of the user-made apps and watch faces.
I was wondering if Mudita were considering doing something similar to spotlight these great apps to more users? Someone here already created the ‘MindApps’ app which acts like a repository to easily download apps specifically designed for the Kompakt. Would Mudita consider including this as standard on the phone in future updates (or creating their own)? I really think it would make the experience a lot better for owners who aren’t engaged on the forums about it and might not know about some of these great apps.
It is a very good suggestion, though; such an app store should probably be curated by Mudita if they promote it. @urszula: What do you think? I believe the team on Mudita is really busy but not able to provide what is needed across all the apps. That is natural, so why not promote the community that really provides fantastic stuff on here? I would only include free, open-source apps for now, so it remains very transparent and safe.
This would be awesome. Another reason for this is so far it seem like most of the apps created with the framework require the user to both build them and sideload them. I am good for sideloading but haven’t crossed the bridge to actually building them with Android so I can’t try them. There definitely should be an option to load these via the Mudita center.
Hey, I’m not sure if you’re implying any of the “calm” apps I built but all of those are pre-built and have apk’s available via the “releases” section of github or on the MindApps store mentioned in the post.
Thanks for sharing this suggestion. We agree it’s an interesting idea, and it’s great to see how much thought the community puts into expanding the Mudita Kompakt ecosystem.
We’re currently exploring ways to give greater visibility to community-created apps while being mindful of the responsibility that comes with recommending tools, as well as the limited capacity of a small team. One of the things we’re working on, which you might already know about, is our own Mudita app store. It will be a platform that will allow sharing third-party applications among Kompakt users.
If and when we have more to share, we’ll definitely communicate it to our community on the forum and beyond :).
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. It genuinely helps guide how things evolve.