NGI Mobifree Fund
This page contains a concise overview of projects funded by NLnet foundation that belong to NGI Mobifree Fund (see the thematic index). There is more information available on each of the projects listed on this page - all you need to do is click on the title or the link at the bottom of the section on each project to read more. If a description on this page is a bit technical and terse, don't despair — the dedicated page will have a more user-friendly description that should be intelligible for 'normal' people as well. If you cannot find a specific project you are looking for, please check the alphabetic index or just search for it (or search for a specific keyword).
Mobile devices like phones and tablets have become pervasive: they are our gateway to the world at large, function as an external brain and are increasingly part of even our most intimate moments. People should therefore be far more empowered when it comes to such a critical dependency. If we want everyone to use and benefit from the internet to its full potential without holding back, the internet must be built on strong and transparent technologies that allow for permissionless innovation and are equally accessible to all.
Mobifree is a pilot programme designed to push beyond the status quo of mobile software, and create a virtuous cycle of innovation through free and open source software, libre hardware and open standards. It has brought together a number of the "movers and shakers" of the open mobile ecosystem, in order to deliver a comprensive development effort and advance a number of important free and open source technologies.
Mobifree is part of the Next Generation Internet initiative, which focuses on the development and maintenance of internet commons that support the vision of a resilient, trustworthy and sustainably open technology stack that empowers users, and grants everyone full autonomy.
Together we work towards better technologies to restore and maintain European sovereignty and to secure democratic ownership of the digital society. Our goal is to help mobile technology evolve to a more healthy state, provide people with concrete new tools and more reliable infrastructure, in order to provide better security and allow users more agency and choice.
But this is a vast domain, with many more challenges than what any preconceived effort could tackle by itself. This is why we invite your contribution to help us reshape the state of play, and together create an open, trustworthy and reliable internet for all.
All project results will become available under a free and open source license so you will be able to study, use, modify and share everything with anyone you want! And even better: part of NGI Mobifree is a supporting grant programme through NLnet, through which auxiliary efforts can be funded. This means that if you are interested in actively contributing to this effort, you can still join! Do you have a project idea that complements, strenghtens or otherwise will benefit the work of Mobifree? Why not put in a proposal yourself, calls are currently open!
Applications are still open, you can apply today.
- Android translation layer (ATL) — Run Android apps on Linux
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The Android Translation Layer is an alternative implementation of Android application APIs on top of standard Desktop Linux, with the ability to run apps as-is using some AOSP components such as ART+libcore, modified to use system-provided libraries where possible to further the goal of being as lightweight as possible. That is in contrast with existing container-based solutions which require running a whole AOSP system in parallel to the host Linux system, resulting in considerably higher resource usage (both disk space and RAM) and longer startup times. The higher efficiency of ATL can make it viable to sideload apps also on more constrained devices. Another benefit of our approach is better integration with the desktop, such as native notifications.
>> Read more about Android translation layer (ATL)
- LambdaNative F-Droid integration — Portable, Productive and Performant App Development with Scheme
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LambdaNative is an free and open source framework that allows for creation of cross-platform applications, in particular on Android and general desktop operating systems such as Linux, BSD's, OS X or Windows. With LambdaNative, even someone with minimal programming background can create nice applications ranging from basic to advanced, using the Scheme programming language. This makes it very suitable for those that do not have a computer science background but still need to create a custom app - such as most researchers, educators and people working in the public sector.
The aim of the project is to add a LambdaNative pipeline to publish apps on the free and open source F-Droid app store. The second part of the project will create educational materials to teach people how to work with LambdaNative mobile application and how to publish their app.
>> Read more about LambdaNative F-Droid integration
- OpenAGPS — Privacy-friendly, self-hostable location service
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Location-specific services benefit greatly from location awareness. However, satellite signals are slow and not always reliably available in urban areas (let alone inside buildings). Hence the need for "assisted GPS", which uses alternate sources such as information based on mobile cell ids to determine location. While it seems obvious for such a capability to be a digital commons, there are no open services reliably providing this information- Mozilla operated something called the Mozilla Location Service, but this was retired recently. This leaves users either unserved or with a huge dependency on a few large vendors that bundle their own location service (based on non-public data sources and dark code) - with the latter users being dependent on the availability of and connectivity to specific machines on the internet. This project aims to provide a self-hostable alternative based on free and public sources, such as Galmon and OpenCellID, which would function independently from the services mentioned earlier.
>> Read more about OpenAGPS
- Termux — Android terminal app and software distro/run-time
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Termux is an Android app that provides a terminal emulator and a GNU/Linux distribution environment with 2000+ packages and executes programs natively on Android host OS/kernel, without any emulation or containerisation. It allows users to locally do most things that can be done on a Linux PC, like program in many languages, use text editors/IDEs, backup files, host websites and servers, and even run a full linux desktop interface.
Under the NGI Mobifree grant the following three improvements to Termux are planned to be implemented: 1) A termux-core library will be created which allows external projects to use Termux execution environment in their own apps. 2) A new APK Library File (APKLF) execution/packaging design will be implemented so that Termux can comply with security restrictions in Android 10 and newer that prevents apps from executing downloaded code. Currently Termux works by being compiled in backward compatibility mode. 3) Package sources will be patched to read paths from environment variables exported by the app, or compiled package files will be patched at install time, rather than relying on hardcoded paths in the package files to Termux rootfs.
>> Read more about Termux
