moarchy-store

A curated store of Linux phone apps that actually fit a small screen.

Shot on a PinePhone at 360×720. The palette is not the app's own — it is read from the active Omarchy theme, here tokyo-night.

pacman -Ss already lists every package. What it cannot tell you is which of them survive 360×720 logical pixels and 2 GB of RAM. That judgement is the whole point of this app.

Built for mobileomarchy on a PinePhone, but nothing in it is specific to that: it is useful on Phosh, Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS, or any Arch-based phone.

What it does

• Browse curated apps by category, with a note on why each one works
• See installed state, version and download size, read live from the system
• Install, open and remove, from the app, by touch
• Marks which entries were verified on real hardware and which are suggestions
• Takes its palette from the active Omarchy theme, so it matches the shell around it rather than shipping a look of its own

Apps are grouped by the toolkit that makes them adaptive — libadwaita (GNOME) and Kirigami (Plasma Mobile) are the two families designed for phone widths. Kirigami apps run fine as ordinary Wayland clients; no KDE session needed.

Two kinds of app, one list

An entry is either a package from the Arch repos or an Omarchy shell plugin — a git repo of QML that omarchy-shell loads into its own process. They sit in the same categories, answer the same search and use the same detail page, because someone looking for a notes app does not care which mechanism delivers it.

Installing a plugin does three things: omarchy plugin add clones and validates it, omarchy plugin enable loads it, and the store writes a .desktop entry so it appears in the app drawer. That last step is what the word app is doing here — the drawer lists desktop entries, not plugins, so without one a plugin can only be opened from a keybinding, which is no use on a device with no keyboard.

Two things are worth knowing before installing one:

• A plugin runs unsandboxed inside your shell. It needs no password because it needs no privilege — it can already do anything you can. The detail page says so above the button, because the store passes --yes to the command that would otherwise have asked.
• Most of the marketplace cannot work here, and that is our bar's fault. 2087 of the 2410 plugins listed on plugins.omarchy.org are bar widgets, and mobileomarchy replaces Omarchy's widget-hosting bar with one sized for 360px that hosts none. Of the rest, most import Quickshell.Hyprland or call hyprctl, and this runs on Sway. catalogue.toml records the sweep.

Install

yay -S moarchy-store-git

The catalogue is the allowlist

Installing packages needs root, which is a genuine privilege surface. The design:

• The polkit action does not point at pacman. It points at /usr/lib/moarchy-store/moarchy-store-helper.
• The helper refuses any package not named in /usr/share/moarchy-store/catalogue.toml, and refuses to run at all if that file is not root-owned and non-world-writable.
• Package names are validated against ^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9@._+-]*$ before use, and pacman is exec'd with an argument list — never a shell.

So authenticating grants "install one of these curated apps", not "install anything". If the action pointed at pacman directly, one authentication would let a user install a package with a setuid binary or an install hook — a straightforward local privilege escalation.

The consequence, deliberately accepted: adding an installable app requires a package update, because it means editing a root-owned file. A catalogue fetched over the network could not be trusted as an allowlist.

Plugins are outside all of this, and it is worth being exact about why. They install into your own ~/.config/omarchy/plugins, need no privilege, and never reach the helper — so the helper's allowlist deliberately excludes them, and a plugin id like shell.settings is a legal package name that must never leak into it. What the catalogue gives a plugin is curation, not a boundary: it fixes the git URL the store will clone, and the store checks that the cloned repo declares the id the catalogue named before enabling it. Nothing stops you running omarchy plugin add yourself, and nothing here pretends otherwise.

Adding an app

Send a PR editing catalogue.toml:

[[app]]
pkg      = "foliate"
name     = "Foliate"
category = "Reading"
toolkit  = "libadwaita"   # libadwaita | kirigami | gtk | qt | tui
summary  = "E-book reader. One of the best things about having a Linux phone."
tested   = "pinephone-a64"   # or "" if you have not run it on a device

A shell plugin instead:

[[app]]
source   = "plugin"
id       = "yordanbuilds.jot"           # must match the repo's manifest.json
repo     = "https://github.com/yordanbuilds/jot.git"
name     = "Jot"
category = "Notes"
toolkit  = "quickshell"
summary  = "Quick capture: one thought, appended to an inbox file."
icon     = "document-new-symbolic"      # generic: plugins ship no icon theme
tested   = ""

tested is not decoration. An empty value renders as "Not yet tested on a device" — a suggestion. A device string is a claim someone can hold you to.

For a plugin, three more things have to be true before it is worth proposing:

1. Its manifest kinds must include overlay, panel or menu — a bar widget has nowhere to draw, a bare service has nothing to open.
2. It must not import Quickshell.Hyprland, or shell out to hyprctl for anything beyond decoration:rounding and general:gaps_out, the only two options mobileomarchy's shim answers.
3. If it takes text, it must take it through a real TextInput, TextField or TextEdit. A plugin that catches raw keys with Keys.onPressed and assembles the string itself never requests text input, so the on-screen keyboard has nothing to respond to and never rises. That plugin is unusable here no matter how well it draws — which is not a thing any static check catches, and is why tested exists.

There is a fourth thing worth checking on hardware, still open: every plugin here sits on WlrLayer.Overlay, while the keyboard sits on Top. An Overlay surface draws over the keyboard, and a full-screen scrim will swallow the taps meant for it. mobileomarchy.drawer avoids this by living on Top and reserving space for the keyboard instead.

Requirements

python, python-gobject, gtk4, libadwaita, polkit, pacman — all of which a GNOME-adjacent phone image already has. Plugin entries additionally need the omarchy CLI on PATH; without it those rows still browse, and only the install button reports it is missing.

License

MIT