Last year, I bought a MacBook. And since I do not have an iPhone, setting it up and integrating it with my other devices was a bit of a hassle. There are some apps like KDE Connect that do claim to add some of the functionality of the Apple walled garden to all of your devices. But especially KDE Connect did not give me the reliability and ease of use I was looking for.
And as time moved on, I began to think that maybe I should tackle this problem myself. Of course, this would have been of a dimension I wouldn't likely manage to complete alone.
My school type in Austria requires students to complete a diploma project in their last year. This project is supposed to show that you are capable of working on a larger project in a team. So when my friends Jan Schäfer, Arshia Reisi and I were looking for a project idea, we decided to take on this project.
Since we wanted to basically mimic the complete Apple walled garden experience, we decided we were going to implement the following features:
Maybe you see these features and think that they are all already implemented in KDE Connect. And you would be right if you were only using your devices in the same network, which has cross-device communication enabled. But as we are not satisfied with this solution, we wanted to implement a solution that works wirelessly without any network.
As this project is for my final year ending in 2024, the project is not yet finished, but should be by April 2024. So I will use this article with incremental updates to show my dev journey and the progress we are making.