Today I joined the Sailship with my phone

It was the awesome awesomeness of the N900 - apt-get to install any applications, apt-get upgrade to keep'em all up-to-date.

So I set up the Jolla Store on the device, did
and nothing appears in the search results.

Is there any way to use Jolla Store from the command line (e.g. via zypper)?

you can use pkcon, for example

Welcome aboard

I think the recommended way of installing packages is pkcon

which does not need root, but zypper should work as well. It works fine for core repos and repositories from OpenRepos.net .

However, installing apps from the Jolla Store is more complicated AFAIR*. As app stores are supposed to contain millions of apps these days (even though it's not the case with Jolla Store yet ), having them in one large repository and let every device refresh the whole repository on every update would be too complicated and would require large index stored locally. Therefore you have your personal repository on Jolla Store, which consists only of apps you install through the Jolla Store app. Your phone then refreshes only this personal repository and checks for updates there.

You can still uninstall these apps through pkcon/zypper and maybe also install some time after you removed them, but not install new apps.

It is an inconvenience in your use case, but once you get to know the reasons behind it, it is quite a reasonable decision. Luckily, you can subscribe to repositories the traditional way from:

• OpenRepos
• Mer OBS

and find apps like Modrana there.


*I am not sure if I recall this correctly, so I hope someone will correct me if I don't.

It looks like I really need to first add the app through the GUI since
returns nothing.
This may indeed become a reasonable decision in the future but looks future-proofing to me

When installing software for SFOS, do you usually choose Jolla Store or OpenRepos as your default software source?

OpenRepos - there is more good apps.

Actually, modRana is a bit of a special case in this regard - it's available in all three (Jolla Store/Harbour, OpenRepos & Mer OBS) repositories. And the OpenRepos and Jolla Store package are actually not the same!

The Jolla Store modRana package
This package needs to conform to Jolla Store/Harbour packaging policies, and does not include some fetures the Open Repos package has:
- using the volume keys for map zoom in/out is not supported
- preventing device deep sleep during track recording is not supported
- keeping screen during incativity is not supported
I haven't really checked if some of these limitations have been removed since I started making the Jolla Store compliant package, so some of these limitations could possibly be removed in the future.

The Jolla Store package might also show up a bit later as it needs to go through the human based QA in Jolla Store - but the delay is generally pretty small, generally a day or two.

The OpenRepos modRana package
OpenRepos does not have the packaging limitations (mostly forbidden QML imports), so the features above (volume key zoom, keep-alive & screen blanking control) are supported by the OpenRepos package. Also as there is no QA in place the package goes live the moment I upload it via the OpenRepos web interface.

Also, unlike the Jolla store, I get notifications for new user comments on OpenRepos and in generall much better statistics about number package of downloads in time & countries from where the download originated. Jolla store just provides two numbers - total number of downloads and "active" installations (whatever that is).

The OBS modRana packages (!)
There are actually two modRana packages in the Mer OBS - and as you might guess, one of them is used to crerate the packages targetting OpenRepos and the ohter one is used for Jolla Store/Harbour packages.

But please note that not all packages that show up in the OBS repositories will show up in Jolla Store/Harbour - some of them are intermediate/cutting-edge/testing builds, but the packages should be generally functional.

For example at the moment the OBS packages are a few revisions newer due to ongoing work on modRana localization & localization testing.

Which modRana package to use ?
Based on the available functionality & feedback-to-developer I have to recommend the OpenRepos package over the Jolla Store one. Even though OpenRepos is not "official" and has zero QA.

If Jolla Store can lift the API limitations and improve the developler experience then I'm happy to change this recommendation in the future.

As for the OBS packages - feel free to use the packages or even add the repos directly, they should be generally function and possibly just a bit less stable than the "normal" packages. And please report any issues you might find so I can fix them.