How to Set Up a Mobile Development Environment

[sdaityari]

Originally published at: https://www.sitepoint.com/mobile-development-environment/

The use of mobile devices has increased considerably in the past decade. It has been over two years since mobile browsing took over desktop. The usability of mobile devices has exploded, too. Mobile devices now come with huge processing power.

We often dismiss mobile platforms as serious workhorses for developers, but today, it's possible to take advantage of mobile portability with a level of flexibility that gets closer to the desktop every year.

This post explains the process of running a Linux development environment from your mobile device using Samsung Dex.

A Brief History of Samsung Dex

Samsung Dex is a platform that allows you to use the computing power of your mobile device to run a desktop-like environment. It was introduced in 2017 and has been actively developed since. The number of devices that can run Dex has increased steadily. In this post, we explore how to set up a Linux development environment through Samsung Dex.

[boltronics]

I think it’s quite interesting. I was prepared to get it when I got my S8+, but the dock wasn’t that cheap at the time (and I was annoyed you even needed a dock since that meant it wasn’t very portable between work and home), and more importantly it apparently did not support a higher resolution than 1920x1080. I use a 2560x1440 monitor at home, and the phone display is 2960x1440 so it should easily have worked (even if it couldn’t output picture to both simultaneously). Unless I can use Dex to output my native monitor resolution, that’s a deal-breaker.

Now that my monitor is old and has burn-in around the edges, I’m eyeing new models. My next monitor will be 384x2160, so at this rate Dex may never catch up as a desktop replacement, sadly.