Welcome, developers!
If you’d like to help us develop Endless OS or create an application for it, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re interested in other ways of contributing, check out our main Get Involved page.
I’d like to help develop Endless OS
Endless OS relies on the GNOME desktop as its foundation. Right now, the best way to contribute to our desktop is to work on upstream features that will roll into and benefit Endless OS since we regularly rebase our desktop to newer versions of GNOME.
If you’re interested in joining GNOME, visit the GNOME Newcomers page and join the #newcomers channel on IRC to chat and get support.
I’d like to develop an app that runs on Endless OS
There are a couple of ways that you can develop an application that will run on Endless OS. You can create an Endless app using the Endless SDK or build a desktop app that runs on Endless and other Linux desktops. More information about each type can be found below.
Building an Endless app
We are actively working on tools and resources to support the development of Endless apps. Right now, we have an Endless SDK and a tutorial for app developers, with more to follow.
The benefit of creating an Endless app is that your app will benefit from Endless’ design ethos, so will truly be a native application for Endless OS with the great look and feel that our apps have. You can also take advantage of all of the offline-first features we’ve built in.
Building a Desktop app that runs on Endless
Endless OS comes with many apps from the GNOME project, and you can build desktop applications for Endless using the same tools and frameworks that they use. You can find the tools and information you need to get started on the GNOME App Developer Portal.
Thanks to Flatpak, there is now a large and growing ecosystem of 3rd party apps that can run on Endless OS. These apps can be found on Flathub, the Flatpak application store.
Here’s information for how to:
Build your first Flatpak app
Publish your Flatpak app
Help us evangelize!
We have converted many 3rd party apps to Flatpak ourselves so that they can run on Endless OS, but we need upstream projects to take over and maintain their apps, and we want to encourage more projects to create Flatpak apps. Please help us evangelize Flatpak and get more adoption!
If you have any questions about how to contribute in the ways mentioned above, ask us on the #en:contribute category of this forum, join the global Endless OS group on Telegram, or choose one of the many other ways to chat with us directly.