search

TurboVNC / turbovnc

Main TurboVNC repository
https://TurboVNC.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
746 stars 136 forks source link

Android version? #370

Closed z0rti closed 1 year ago

z0rti commented 1 year ago

Is there/will there be/is it planned?

dcommander commented 1 year ago

There was some commercial interest in that about 10-12 years ago, to the point that one of TurboVNC's sponsors paid me to improve the Java TurboVNC Viewer with an eye toward eventually creating an Android app. The interest unfortunately waned, however, due to budget tightening at the sponsor company. Ultimately that work benefited out project, because the Java TurboVNC Viewer gained enough momentum to eventually replace all of the native viewers, which used old and hard-to-maintain raw GUI code. However, there hasn't been any push toward an Android TurboVNC Viewer since then, partly because Android is a less popular platform among enterprise users these days. (Whereas Android has about 70% market share overall, iOS has about 80% market share among enterprise users.) That's also why TurboVNC's competitors largely haven't bothered with an Android VNC viewer. Because Apple won't allow GPL-licensed code in its app store, that severely limits the options for mobile VNC viewers. RealVNC is the only major VNC vendor that provides an iOS app, which they can only do because their code is proprietary/closed source. All of the vendors that are using a GPL-licensed VNC code base are investing time/money into VNC viewer web apps (including noVNC) rather than native mobile apps.

I have very little experience with mobile development and even less experience with mobile GUI development, so an Android TurboVNC Viewer would be a huge undertaking for me. It isn't just a matter of blindly porting the same interfaces from the desktop version. We'd have to completely rethink how the viewer works and consider what makes the most sense for mobile users vis-a-vis productively interfacing with a remote desktop environment that was never designed for mobile devices. It would probably make more sense for someone else to do most of that work and then consult with me regarding usability and performance.