Under active development. Features may change and instability is possible.
Your Linux phone on your Linux desktop: battery and messages in the panel, and a window for calls, SMS, contacts, appointments and the phone's settings - over SSH, with nothing to install on the phone.
The screenshots show invented people and data (tools/screenshot-demo.py,
light and dark joined by tools/screenshot-diagonal.py).
Made for Phosh phones, and explicitly for the FuriLabs FLX1 / FLX1s running FuriOS - that is where it is developed and tested. Other Phosh phones with the same stack (ofono, chatty, GNOME Calls, evolution-data-server) may work, but are not tested; calls at the PC need the FLX1's call audio. On the PC it runs on any desktop and adapts to it (see Desktops).
 Telephone - the line to call over (SIM 1, SIM 2, SIP), dial pad and recent calls |
 Messages - a conversation, the others by day |
 Contacts - a contact with its calls, messages and appointments |
 Appointments - month and agenda |
 Files - the phone's home folder |
 Screen - screen sharing or a desktop session |
 Settings - the phone's settings |
- Panel icon - a phone that fills up with the battery level, a bolt while charging, a badge for unread messages and new voice messages, details in the tooltip, a menu for the rest.
- Overview - battery, mobile network, Wi-Fi and connection at a glance; the last calls, conversations and the next appointments in two or three columns. New or current entries carry a blue edge.
- Telephone - dial pad with the line to call over (SIM 1, SIM 2, SIP accounts), the call history with VoiceBox's voice messages in their places, answer and hang up a call in progress, and - where the phone allows it - talk at the PC instead of the phone.
- Messages - chatty's SMS conversations with profile pictures: read, reply, write new ones, delete whole conversations.
- Contacts - all address books of the phone (local and synced: CardDAV, Google …): look up, call, write (an email opens the PC's mail program), add, change and delete, with photos. Beside a contact - below it in a narrow window - what there is with the person: last contact, calls and voice messages, the last messages, appointments that name them. A click on a person's picture anywhere in the app opens their contact.
- Appointments - all calendars of the phone as month and agenda: add, change and delete appointments with reminders; recurring ones as a series or a single day.
- Files - the phone's folders with thumbnails: open a file on the PC (a changed copy can go back with one click), play music right there (a double click; it plays on while the folders change), download, upload (also by dragging files onto the window), new folder, rename, delete. Transfers show their progress and can be cancelled.
- Settings - quick switches (mobile data, Wi-Fi, volume, ring and power profile, find the phone), and the phone's own settings section by section: appearance, screen and power, lock screen, notifications (per app too), sound and vibration, GNOME Calls and its SIP accounts, Chatty, contacts, calendar reminders, keyboard, privacy and location - plus a search over every GSettings key.
- Phone links -
tel:,callto:andsms:links anywhere on the desktop (browser, mail) open in PhoneBridge: the number in the dial pad, one click to call; the conversation with the link's text. - Music - what plays on the phone (any MPRIS player), with back, play/pause and next in the overview and the panel menu - and a switch for where it plays: the phone's speaker or this PC's. Ringing, notifications and calls stay on the phone; the choice is kept per phone.
- Photo backup - new photos and videos of the phone's camera come to a folder on the PC by themselves, every half hour while the phone is on Wi-Fi; what was backed up once is not fetched again (Settings → Photo backup).
- Clipboard - text to the phone or from it by hand (panel menu, window menu), or shared both ways by itself once switched on (Menu → Share the clipboard with the phone; off by default - passwords pass through clipboards).
- Send to the phone - a web link opens in the phone's browser, files and folders land in
its Downloads (never over an existing file) with a notification there. From the panel
menu, the window's menu, Thunar's Send To menu or
phonebridge --send FILE|URL …. - Notifications on the desktop for new messages, calls, voice messages, a full battery and one running empty - with the person's picture, text buttons, gone after 10 seconds. The phone's other apps too (messengers, mail, calendar …): Close on the phone closes one there, and one closed on the phone goes here as well. Menu → Show the phone's notifications turns that off.
- Webcam - the phone's front or back camera as this PC's webcam (Settings → Webcam or the panel menu): in every program once a virtual camera is set up (v4l2loopback - the app does it with one password prompt), else as a PipeWire camera (OBS, GNOME Snapshot …). 720p H.264 over SSH, the camera on only while it is used. Test … shows the live picture as programs get it, with its size and pictures a second.
- The phone's screen - live on the Screen page, and usable from the PC: a click taps, dragging swipes (Phosh's swipes from the edges too), holding is a long press, the mouse wheel scrolls, keys typed there are typed on the phone. Buttons for power, the app overview and the volume, for turning the phone between portrait and landscape, and for full screen (Esc goes back); three picture qualities. The picture runs only while the page is shown, and the phone's screen stays on meanwhile.
- A desktop of the phone's own - the other way on the Screen page: a GNOME desktop started on the phone without a screen and shown here in an RDP window (FreeRDP 3), in a resolution chosen beforehand (720p upwards). Phosh goes on as it is; the desktop has its own D-Bus and dconf database, but the user's files and apps. It is drawn without the graphics chip - fine for files, settings and simple apps. What is missing on the phone or the PC is listed, with the commands that set it up.
- Screenshot of the phone - from the panel or window menu, shown on the PC to copy or save (while the phone's screen is on and unlocked).
- Hotspot - switch the phone's hotspot from Settings → Quick settings, and keep it on this PC once (the password, asked once): NetworkManager then joins it by itself whenever it is on and no other known Wi-Fi is there, and PhoneBridge reaches the phone through it.
- Search everything (Ctrl+K or the search button) - contacts, conversations and the messages' text, calls, appointments and the phone's files at once.
- Several phones, one of them shown in the panel. English and German.
Nothing is installed on the phone and no port is opened there. PhoneBridge starts python3
on the phone over SSH and feeds it phonebridge/agent.py; the agent answers JSON lines on
the same connection and reports changes by itself. It reads and changes what the phone's own
apps use:
| What | On the phone |
|---|---|
| Battery | UPower |
| Network, mobile data, calls in progress, incoming SMS | ofono |
| Sending SMS | ModemManager (as chatty does) |
| SMS history | chatty's SQLite store |
| Contacts, appointments | evolution-data-server over D-Bus - changes sync to the accounts |
| Call history | GNOME Calls' records.db (read only) |
| Lines | SIM cards by ICCID (ofono), SIP accounts of GNOME Calls |
| Voice messages | VoiceBox, when it is installed |
| Wi-Fi, volume, ring profile, power profile | NetworkManager, WirePlumber, feedbackd, power-profiles |
| Settings | GSettings |
| Music | MPRIS players on the session bus; on the PC: the players' streams (target.object) into a pw-record sink → raw 48 kHz stereo over SSH → pw-play |
| Clipboard | wl-copy / wl-paste (the compositor's data-control) |
| Screenshot | grim (wlr-screencopy), else Phosh's screenshot service |
| Screen | wf-recorder (wlr-screencopy, x264, only changed pictures) → FLV over SSH → GStreamer on the PC; taps and keys back through a virtual touchscreen and keyboard (uinput, python3-evdev) |
| Desktop session | gnome-shell --headless and GNOME Remote Desktop on a D-Bus of their own; RDP through SSH (one ssh per connection - the phone's sshd forwards no ports); the port closed to the network by an iptables rule while it runs |
| Webcam | droidcamsrc → x264 (zero latency) → H.264 over SSH; on the PC GStreamer (slice decoding, ~50 ms) → v4l2loopback or PipeWire |
| Hotspot | NetworkManager on the phone; on the PC a profile over NetworkManager's D-Bus API |
| The phone's notifications | watched on the session bus (a D-Bus monitor), closed through the notification daemon |
| Files | the file system, as the phone's user; contents over an SSH connection of their own |
Changing chatty's store or GNOME Calls' accounts needs the app to be stopped meanwhile; PhoneBridge does that for a moment and starts it again exactly as it ran - never during a call.
PhoneBridge looks at the desktop it runs on and adapts:
| Panel icon | a StatusNotifierItem - Xfce (Status Tray Plugin), KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE (Notification Area), Budgie, LXQt, waybar … show it. When no panel shows it, PhoneBridge says once what would (on GNOME the AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support extension) and keeps running in the background. |
| Notifications | a click on the notification where the daemon takes one (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, dunst, mako …); buttons with words where it would show an empty button (xfce4-notifyd, MATE). |
| Light or dark | the color-scheme setting where the desktop has it (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie …); elsewhere (Xfce, MATE, LXDE, LXQt) the dark theme's name or prefer dark in GTK's settings. |
| Send to the phone | Thunar's Send To, Nautilus and Caja scripts, Nemo actions, Dolphin's service menu, PCManFM's actions - for the file managers that are there. |
| Messages at the start | zenity, or kdialog on KDE. |
About PhoneBridge → Troubleshooting shows what was recognised.
On the PC - checked at every start; what is missing is shown, with the command to install it.
| Arch / Manjaro | Debian / Ubuntu | |
|---|---|---|
| Required | python-gobject gtk4 libadwaita python-cairo openssh |
python3-gi gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-adw-1 python3-cairo openssh-client |
| Passwords in the keyring | libsecret |
gir1.2-secret-1 |
| Calls at the PC | pipewire (pw-record, pw-play), libpulse (pactl) |
pipewire-bin, pulseaudio-utils |
| The phone's screen | gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-libav |
gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-libav |
| Desktop session | freerdp (FreeRDP 3); on the phone gnome-shell gnome-remote-desktop |
freerdp3-x11; on the phone gnome-shell gnome-remote-desktop |
| Webcam | gst-plugins-bad gst-libav gst-plugin-pipewire; for every program v4l2loopback-dkms v4l2loopback-utils and the kernel's headers (Manjaro: linuxXY-headers) |
gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-pipewire v4l2loopback-dkms v4l2loopback-utils |
Fedora: python3-gobject gtk4 libadwaita python3-cairo openssh-clients (and libsecret,
pipewire-utils, pulseaudio-utils); openSUSE: python3-gobject typelib-1_0-Gtk-4_0 typelib-1_0-Adw-1 python3-pycairo openssh-clients. PhoneBridge names the missing ones with
the command for the distribution it runs on.
On the phone - an SSH server, Python 3 with PyGObject, and the usual mobile stack (ofono, ModemManager, chatty, GNOME Calls, evolution-data-server), as FuriOS brings them.
Calls at the PC need PipeWire running on the phone with the call audio nodes
droid-call-sink / droid-call-source (a patched spa-droid plugin on the FLX1);
without them the option is not offered.
On the desktop, as your user (not root) - one line:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/misc-de/PhoneBridge/main/install.sh | bashIt installs into ~/.local only, puts PhoneBridge in the menu and starts it at login
(… | NO_AUTOSTART=1 bash leaves that out). Nothing is installed on the phone.
Updates - PhoneBridge looks on GitHub for a newer release (a minute after the start, then
every six hours) - only releases, not every change on main. When there is one, Update
available shows at the top left of the window; a click lists the changes and asks, and
PhoneBridge installs the update and starts anew.
Menu → Look for updates turns that off. Running the install line again updates as well.
Or from a checkout:
git clone https://github.com/misc-de/PhoneBridge.git
cd PhoneBridge && ./install.shOr as a Flatpak, built from a checkout (needs flatpak-builder and the GNOME 50 runtime):
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-flatpak flatpak/io.github.miscde.PhoneBridge.yml
flatpak run io.github.miscde.PhoneBridgeThe Flatpak keeps the phones in the same ~/.config/phonebridge as an install without it, and
Flatpak updates it, not PhoneBridge. FreeRDP's client for the desktop session comes along
(built without H.264: the session falls back to RemoteFX). Not in the Flatpak: the phone's
hotspot from the PC (no nmcli), loading v4l2loopback for the webcam (it works once the
module is loaded), Send to the phone in the file managers' menus, and spotting apps that run
on this PC too (the sandbox does not see them). Run only one of the two at a time.
At the first start PhoneBridge asks for the phone's address and user (furios on FuriOS) and
connects right away. If the phone does not take the PC's SSH key yet, it asks for the password
once and puts the key on the phone (like ssh-copy-id); without an SSH key on the PC it offers
to make one. More phones: Menu → Phones ….
phonebridge --background # the panel icon only (autostart)
phonebridge --calendar # straight to a page: --overview, --phone, --messages,
# --contacts, --calendar, --files, --settings
phonebridge --quit # ends the running instance
./uninstall.sh # PURGE=1 also removes the settings- Only SSH, with your key (or a password kept in the desktop's keyring - never in a file of
PhoneBridge's; ssh gets it through
SSH_ASKPASS). An unknown phone's host key is learnt on first contact, a changed one is refused. - Besides SSH to the phone, PhoneBridge only talks to GitHub: to look for updates (unless switched off) and to fetch one when you say so.
- Nothing listens on the phone or the PC. The agent runs only while connected and ends when the PC goes away (the phone's microphone is never left muted).
- Texts from others (SMS, names, network names) are never read as markup; numbers are checked before they are dialled.
- Files with personal data are readable by you only: caches on the PC, the log of sent SMS on the phone. Deleting a conversation leaves no copy behind.
tests/run-tests.sh # all tests - no phone, no network, no root
tests/run-tests.sh test_pim # one module
tests/coverage.sh # coverage, the agent's process includedThe tests run the agent on the PC against made-up data, with stand-ins for ssh, chatty,
GNOME Calls, PipeWire and evolution-data-server, on a private D-Bus - your settings, keyring,
~/.ssh and desktop are never touched. The window tests need a display but never show a window.
kill -USR1 <pid> makes a running instance write its Python stacks to
~/.cache/phonebridge/stacks.txt.
Texts are written in English in the code and translated in phonebridge/lang_de.py;
tests/test_i18n.py checks that every text has its German.
MIT © 2026 misc-de