Dolphone

Calls and texts for the Flipper One. Fit a cellular modem in the M.2 slot and your Flipper One rings: calls, texts, emergency alerts, contacts and a call log, with Bluetooth headsets, the 3.5 mm jack and speakerphone. On the panel it is a set of ordinary FlipCTL apps driven by the Flipper’s own buttons; in desktop mode it is a proper desktop app; from a shell it is phonectl.

Unofficial. Dolphone is not made or endorsed by Flipper Devices. Not for emergencies. It passes 000/112/911 to the modem, which the network treats as emergency calls, and never blocks them, but it is hobby software on a pre-release device: carry a real phone.

What it does

How it fits together

 FlipCTL (unchanged)        Dolphone apps on the panel         dolphone-desktop    phonectl
        │                    Phone · Messages · Settings        (desktop mode)     (scripts)
        │ flipctl open                 │                              │                │
        └──────────────┐               │      D-Bus (session)        │                │
                       ▼               ▼                              ▼                ▼
                  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
                  │ phoned: calls, texts, alerts, call audio, contacts, Bluetooth, the store │
                  └───────┬───────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────┬─────────────┘
                          │ D-Bus (system)│ PipeWire       │ BlueZ        │ baresip
                     ModemManager      speaker / jack /   headsets,      SIP calls
                          │            Bluetooth / modem  phonebook
                     M.2 modem (RM520N-GL)

phoned is the only thing that talks to ModemManager’s voice and messaging and the only thing that routes call audio, so the panel, the desktop and your scripts never disagree about a call. More in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Status

Everything above works against fake-mm, a stand-in ModemManager that mmcli itself accepts, and a second baresip playing the far end of SIP calls. The tests:

• 224 end-to-end checks (scripts/e2e.sh): phoned, the fake modem, a fake mmsd-tng and phonectl playing through calls, texts, MMS, alerts, SIM PIN and SIM codes, an emergency call with the SIM locked, SIP, service codes, the modem’s setup, grants, rules, contacts, the encrypted store, serial call audio through real PipeWire, and what an untrusted script is and is not allowed to do; they also pass with every CPU core busy, as a stand-in for a slow device;
• 5 live UI tests (scripts/ui-e2e.sh): the Dialer, Messages, Settings and the desktop app (and its tray icon), driven through their real input against a live phoned, with a screenshot of each step;
• 10 KDE Connect checks (scripts/kdeconnect-e2e.sh) against the real kdeconnectd: pairing, texts both ways, a ringing call;
• 184 unit tests, including every panel screen rendered and checked against the panel’s fonts.

Before release it had thirty reviews: ten for features and fit, then twenty more on security from a same-user program and from the network, Rust robustness, concurrency, data integrity, packaging, the modem, audio, emergency calling, telephony standards, numbers abroad, accessibility, the scripting API, the tests themselves, onboarding, FlipCTL’s conventions, licensing, battery use, failure recovery and privacy. What they found is fixed or written down in ROADMAP.md.

The panel apps also run in the real FlipCTL (its browser view, in a VM). Dolphone has not yet carried a real call: that needs the hardware test in docs/HARDWARE.md, whose deciding question is whether the RM520N-GL’s USB audio gives Linux two-way call audio.

Install on the Flipper One

Flipper OS is Debian 13 (arm64):

sudo apt install ./dolphone_0.1.0_arm64.deb   # built with scripts/package-deb.sh until the first release
dolphone-install-apps                          # as yourself: Apps > Phone on the panel

The install asks one question: whether Dolphone may send setup commands to the modem, which turns on ModemManager’s debug mode (yes by default on a Flipper One, where call audio needs it; sudo dolphone-modem-access on|off changes it later, and port on gives Dolphone a spare AT port instead, untested on a real modem). The package recommends what the optional parts use: mmsd-tng for picture messages and group texts, baresip for SIP, bluez-obexd for copying contacts from a phone, wl-clipboard or xclip for Copy, and suggests espeak-ng for spoken caller ID. More in docs/install.md.

Other devices

Dolphone is built for the Flipper One, and its panel apps are FlipCTL’s. Underneath, phoned only needs Linux, ModemManager, PipeWire and BlueZ, so the daemon, phonectl and the desktop app run on other machines with a modem too. What differs between machines (mixer controls, where the modem’s audio is, which front ends fit) is a device profile: one TOML file, picked automatically and shown by phonectl device. These ship:

Each profile says where its values came from; “untested” means nobody has run docs/HARDWARE.md on one yet. Adding a machine is one file, no code: docs/DEVICES.md. There is an amd64 package for laptops.

Try it without a Flipper One

On an Apple Silicon Mac with OrbStack:

scripts/dev-setup.sh                 # a Debian 13 arm64 machine, FlipCTL built, fake modem in
orb -m f1 scripts/run-dev.sh         # build, install, start; open http://f1.orb.local:8899/
orb -m f1 ~/.local/bin/phonectl fake ring 0491570156     # and watch the panel
orb -m f1 ~/.local/bin/phonectl fake sms 0491570156 "hello"
orb -m f1 ~/.local/bin/phonectl fake broadcast 4370 "Test alert"

More in docs/DEVELOPING.md.

From a shell

phonectl send --wait 0491570156 "build finished"   # waits for a press on the device, then for the network
phonectl mms 0491570156 --file photo.jpg "Look"    # a picture message (needs mmsd-tng)
phonectl modem setup                               # is the modem set up for calls? (apply to fix it)
phonectl otp --from 0491570156 --wait 60           # prints the code from the next text (needs a read grant)
phonectl grant 0491570156 4 30                      # ask to text it without asking, 4 an hour, for 30 days
phonectl --json watch                               # every event, one JSON object per line
phonectl contacts import ~/Downloads/contacts.vcf
phonectl device                                     # which device profile, and why

phonectl help lists the rest. For scripts, it exits 0 when done (or waiting for the device), 1 when tried and failed, 2 when not allowed, 3 for a bad argument or something this phone does not do, 4 over a rate limit, and 5 when phoned is not running. Everything it does is on the D-Bus API, which busctl and gdbus reach as well.

What is not done

• A real call. Everything is tested against stand-ins; the hardware test in docs/HARDWARE.md comes first, and with it the Quectel commands that only real firmware can confirm.
• A large-text mode, fonts beyond Latin and Cyrillic, and news outside Dolphone’s apps on the panel (a status-bar badge, a toast): FlipCTL has none of these, and Dolphone may add them later as options. Until then, names the font cannot draw fall back to the number.
• Sending texts to a SIP address: baresip 1.1.0 cannot; texts over SIP are received, and replies go over the mobile network.
• RCS: there is no route to it from Linux.

ROADMAP.md has the details.

Docs

• Install
• Buttons: every key on every screen
• Rules on incoming texts: run a command when a matching text arrives
• Architecture: the pieces and why they are split that way
• Audio: routes, echo cancellation, Bluetooth, the jack
• Devices: device profiles, and adding one
• Hardware bring-up: the go/no-go test with a real modem
• Developing: the dev machine, tests, bundles, packages
• Security: the threat model and what to report
• Contributing

License

Source: MIT. The panel apps and the desktop app link Slint (the panel apps through flipctl-app) under GPL-3.0-only, so those binaries are GPL-3.0-only; each release carries the full corresponding source, and the Debian package says where it is in /usr/share/doc/dolphone/copyright. phoned, phonectl and the gateway are MIT, with their dependencies’ notices in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md (SQLCipher’s among them). The panel fonts are CC BY-SA 3.0, Unlicense and MIT, and the AppImage runtime at the head of each bundle has its own notices; see each bundle’s NOTICE.md.