Today we are officially publishing the first stable release of KDE Connect. Hooray! This version is the most solid yet feature-packed version we ever released. It’s been in development for a year now and it took a lot of hard work, we hope you like it!

New features

Trigger custom commands from your phone

Pre-configure commands in the KDE Connect desktop settings so you can trigger them from your phone. Use it to extend KDE Connect’s functionality to suit your needs!

Reply to SMS messages from your desktop

Probably the most awaited feature ever! Now when you receive a text message notification on the desktop, a ‘Reply’ button will allow you to text back without having to use your phone at all. Note you will need the version 1.4 of the Android app for this to work, already available, as we had to ask for a new permission for it to work.

Receive desktop notifications on your phone

Contributed by Holger Kaelberer, this is the counterpart of the phone-to-desktop notification sync we already had. It might be a bit spammy sometimes, so we decided to ship it disabled by default. Make sure you enable it both in the Android app and the System Settings module if you are interested in this feature. From the plugin settings you can choose which notifications you want to forward to your phone and which not.

TLS encryption

Thanks to the Google Summer of Code project of Vineet Garg, KDE Connect now uses TLS sockets instead of RSA private-key encryption. This is not only safer against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks, but also faster and less battery-consuming to compute on your devices. Like SSH, we do trust-on-first-use (or TOFU, which sounds funnier) of the device certificate, and we have added a command line option to allow you to check the certificate fingerprints match on both ends.

How to update?

If your favorite Linux distribution doesn’t release an update for KDE Connect 1.0 soon, please contact the distro packagers and let them know you want it! If you are familiar with building software from sources and can’t wait for your distro to package it, you can always build KDE Connect 1.0 from the sources available on download.kde.org.

While the Android app is backwards compatible with desktops running old versions of KDE Conect, the just released desktop version requires you to use the version 1.0 or newer of the Android app. Since we have seen that Android updates reach final users much faster than their desktop counterparts, this shouldn’t impact your ability to use KDE Connect. Just make sure you are using a recent version from F-Droid or the Play Store.

Update 20/09/16: This is no longer the latest version of KDE Connect. If you are looking for the sources to download, make sure to get the latest ones from the KDE downloads site.