Is there a build of Pidgin for iPhones? I know it isn’t in the app store but I’m asking just in case there is an unofficial build somewhere.
The main reason I ask is because I like to use the Bonjour/Avahi capability for low effort messaging between laptops, it would be great if my iphone could join the party.
I found this app on the app store, it can discover web servers on a local network but it can’t do chat.
There will never be a build of Pidgin for iPhone. The App Store agreement is incompatible with the GPL license Pidgin and libpurple are distributed under, and there are several people, myself included, who refuse to allow the license exception required to allow the App Store to distribute Pidgin.
There is not and it is unlikely to ever happen. The short story is that there are 2 terms in the iOS app store that are blocking us.
The first term is not compatible with the GPLv2 License that Pidgin is released under and we can’t easily grant an exception to it due to our it being impossible for us to get all of our copyright holders to grant the exception. For example, some of them are companies that no longer exist.
The other term claims that we have to have explicit permission to access any computer network that we’re accessing and must provide that permission on demand. We are not going to get for any proprietary and if we’re forced to get it for each public network that’s going to be a huge investment in time.
So even if we got all of that taken care of, we’d still need to actually build an iOS compatible front end which is unlikely to happen as no one on the dev team uses an iPhone as far as I know.
This is also why it is unlikely that we’ll every support a side losed build via cydia. There’s just not enough return on investment for us to justify it.
