Sailors and friends,
There’s an app named Delta Chat, a messenger that uses end-to-end encrypted e-mail but looks like WA. It’s Open Source and the Android app works fine with Sailfish Appsupport.
Link to their homepage:
Link to Github:
Q: Is there a way to create a native SFOS app out of the sources from GitHub?
There is also a port for UT, maybe that helps porting.
That leads to the question: is it possible to port UT apps generally to SFOS and also SFOS apps to UT, as basically both is Linux.
Many work for both Systems for example puremaps. Delta Chat is quite old and therefore pretty stable. Good messenger alternative. I guess that sailtrix is the only native sailfish messenger based on matrix, which is fully open source and decentralized. Another one would be nice. And email is something mostly everybody has.
More information from ubuntu touch app store, openstore app DeltaTouch here … OpenStore
Many of the popular mail servers need a bit of work to get them to work. But thats not a big issue.
Sailtrix hasn’t seen an update in ages. Works but its missing a lot of stuff. Probably the dev doesn’t have time or abandoned the effort. And its sad.
I am in the process of porting a very very simple UT app to SFOS.
That one is using a plain c++ backend and qml.
The c++ part compiled and ran right away.
The qml part needed conversion of some UT-specific parts to either plain qml or Silica.
So for that app it is possible, but the qml conversion took almost as long as writing a new frontend from scratch in Silica. It did help that all the ‘logic’ was there already though.
So yes, for some UT apps porting is possible, but depending on the app, it may be considerable effort.
First step would probably be to get this to compile (rust):
If that is available, draw the rest of the fucking owl, i.e. wrap it and make an UI, a la whisperfish and fernschreiber.
Alternative possibility: do what Hydrogen did: try to get the ‘desktop’, i.e. Electron/Tauri/Webapp variant to build, and wrap it in WebView.
Oh yes, this is what I wanted already a year ago! 
There is also a python library interfacing with the rust one:
https://pypi.org/project/deltachat/
So once the lib is available, a native app would not necessarily need to talk to it directly, pyotherside could help.
I have tried to build the rust library on OBS, but failed.
Rust in SFOS5 is too old for at least 3 of the dependent crates, and cargo is too old to read the latest version’s config (1.160.0, the previous version doesn’t have that problem).
If any of the local rust people have a newer compiler available, here’s what I have so far:
https://build.sailfishos.org/package/show/home:nephros:devel:email/deltachat-core
Any more news about a Delta Chat client yet? There is a client in Open Repos that not really work. So I hope someone has a solution or workarond to use Delta Chat. I am on a Fairphone 5 so not the possibility to use an Android app (Waydroid is not working).
It really does work.
Oke, with some copy and past from the Delta Chat Desktop app. I will give it an other change 
I copy the map config, data, cache form the Desktop Delta Chat client of my Linux PC to the /.config/Deltachat map on the phone. Still the error: No account configured yet. So how do I get it to work?
*edit It works now. It was the Deltachat map inside the config map of the Desktop client that needed to be copied into ./config/ of the telephone. So its works now, but I am not really used by this kind of terminal kind of applications.
Does this mean Delta Chat works on Sailfish? How to?
Yes it does. And as described above. Install the app, use the config trom a desktop install and it works. But it is a terminal appliction, for me hard to work with. Enter groups and chat with #, 1 etc
There’s no notifications yet with ArcaneChat. It would be a great improvement to compile DeltaTouch for SailfishOS:
As has been said, a prerequisite to getting this working is having a more up-to-date rust environment available.
(See also: Integrate e-mail based messenger in Sailfish OS - #15 by rubdos)
Which as far as we know may be available in SFOS 5.1.
So wait until Sailfish OS 5.1 is released.