Will there be any official ports to Chinese devices?
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@ddabrahim yes, we all want more devices ported to UT, but that's the problem precisely: we need to port each device model, one by one. And there are some minimum requirements to do that too.
You can see the necessary steps in https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction.html and http://docs.halium.org/en/latest/porting/first-steps.html
Some people are trying to port some devices now https://github.com/Halium/projectmanagement/issues and as you can see there, is a hard, slow, and soul-sucking task
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@advocatux
What I would like to see is not really more ports, but ports for cheap devices. At the moment everybody want to see a port for flagship phones which makes no sense in my honest opinion. I would personally never flash a flagship phone cost hundreds of dollars with Ubuntu. I mean would you really flash a Google Pixel cost 600 USD? I like Ubuntu and Linux, but not that much. Chinese devices are more affordable in new condition but no one seem to care for them. But I see your point and thanks for the links too, I'm glad to see some people do try to port to Motorola G4 and G5 at least -
@ddabrahim well Fairphone 2 costs 529€ and UT users are happy with it, so...
If porters can get their hands on those «cheap Chinese devices», the hardware reach the minimum requirements, they can get the source tree, etc sure, they could (and probably will) be ported.
As you can see is not a matter of «no one seem to care for them»
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@ddabrahim said in Will there be any official ports to Chinese devices?:
I mean would you really flash a Google Pixel cost 600 USD? I like Ubuntu and Linux, but not that much.
That is a very good point actually. Going with that, then Ubuntu Touch would only get any traction on such flag ship devices in the tail end of their support window, by which time they would no longer be flagship devices.
While I understand the reasoning behind your call for porting to these no-name Chinese brands. I guess a huge part of the difficulty presented would be exactly the fact that they are no-name. Their availability would be limited among developers here, and there would probably not be any android source trees to start the porting from. The fact that they mostly run older versions of Android might also prove problematic, as older versions run on correspondingly older kernels, which in turn might lack necessary functionality for UTouch to work.
Now, if this project were to catch on in China proper, on the other hand!
EDIT: @advocatux beat me to an answer
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try ebay for a meizu pro5.
or a tablet BQ m10.
You never know whats on there -
Given the Android app problem you mention, perhaps a Chinese OEM might start to consider alternative OSs such as UT.
What's slightly grating though, is I've recently read 2 articles, right in UBport's territory: one essentially about converging devices in our parlance, and the other about open sourcing drivers for phones - Halium, etc., and neither mentioned UT. It's almost as if there's a black hole around this project.
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@3arn0wl hmm interesting. Are those articles written for FOSS users or for a more wide audience?
Can you share the links? Thank you
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@3arn0wl thank you!
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@ddabrahim While I can understand the reasoning the problem with cheap devices is that we have 90% no way of re-compiling the parts we need to make the hardware work. We need a few basic bits to be available in source code, and then the whole vendor tree as closed source.
If you find a cheap Chinese phone with a good LineageOS port (official) then we might try. Everything what is unofficially ported to LineageOS may break or cost us hundreds of hours. This is not really efficient.
There is a reason why they are cheap. They are not meant to be modded.
BR