Tahoe-LAFS Mobile

As ​announced to the tahoe-dev mailing list, ​Least Authority is working, since 2024-04, on a mobile client application for Tahoe-LAFS:

• Mobile app:
  • start with the "PrivateStorage Mobile" android-only read-only app
  • support arbitrary grids
  • port to iOS
  • add upload

Links

• The mentioned "PrivateStorage Mobile" app can be found ​here.
• The work on changing that into an app that works with arbitrary grids, also works on iOS and can upload to Tahoe happens ​here (Code repo, milestones, issue tracker).
• The application is building on the new ​Haskell client library.

Goals

The ​milestones should reflect the progress of the work.

• We first want to be able to read files from a user-defined tahoe-lafs storage grid.
  • For now, a file with a list of storage servers is fine - introducers may be considered later.
• Also work on iOS.
• Integration with the OSses (Android, iOS) to be able to open files from and share files to the app (​Storage Access Framework on Android, ?? on iOS)
  • Idea: As an intermediary step, because mobile development is clunky and hard and slow, create code to glue the GBS Haskell protocol code (start with ​GBS-Downloader) to FUSE or 9P
• We want to be able to save files to the grid (this is a big one, as the Haskell protocol stack is missing most of this so far)
• Would be nice to also get a working in-browser client out of this (The ​framework in use supports that in theory)

Non-Goals

• Be a storage server/join a grid as a storage node
• Fix introducers to work with GBS instead of Foolscap (so far: Just list the storage servers you want to use)
• ...