Phosh 0.57 brings dual-column panel in landscape mode and new transition animation for Linux phones

The Phosh project has released version 0.57 of its mobile shell environment, which is built on GNOME technologies and the GTK toolkit. The release was made on August 19, 2026. Previous versions were released in April (0.54), May (0.55), and July (0.56) of the same year.

Originally developed by Purism as a GNOME Shell alternative for the Librem 5 smartphone, Phosh has since become an unofficial GNOME project and is used in postmarketOS, Mobian, Droidian, various Pine64 device firmware, and the Fedora smartphone edition. The environment relies on the Phoc compositor, which runs on top of Wayland, and its own on-screen keyboard. All project code is distributed under the GPLv3+ license.

Phosh 0.57 is based on GNOME 50 and wlroots 0.20.2, along with updated components including Calls 50.0, ModemManager 1.25.95, feedbackd 0.8.9, and mmsd-tng 2.6.4.

The most notable improvement is enhanced handling of landscape orientation. When the shell is unlocked and the device is rotated horizontally, Phosh switches to a dual-column layout for the top panel. This change allows better use of the extra horizontal space on wider displays.

A new transition animation has been added for moving from a running application to the overview screen. However, this feature is disabled by default because further refinements are planned for the upcoming Phosh 0.58 development cycle.

Additionally, separate panels have been introduced for Wi-Fi, cellular connectivity, online accounts, network, and Bluetooth. These are based on their counterparts from the GNOME desktop environment.