Call for help!

AppLee

Hi everyone!

I know it can be hard to grasp what UBports does.
It's hard for people to buy a device (often very expensive), install Ubuntu Touch on it and realize it's not what they expected.

Many people are disappointed because some things are taken for granted, considered: "normal" or "basic".
Also people come with "needs" related to their phone usage.

I'm lucky because what I consider "needs" are very simple:
Shelter, food, oxygen and friends
The rest is nice to have and I consider it privileges.

This intro is to put things into perspective and to explain what is done at UBports.
When considering Ubuntu Touch at the moment, it is important to make the distinction between:

The device ; produced and sold by a manufacturer,
The port ; made and supported by the maintainer(s),
Ubuntu Touch ; initiated by Canonical and now maintained by a tiny subset of our community,
Apps ; built by developers within this community.

The foundation UBports encourages porting to new devices and is set to promote the best ports or at least to give a clear picture of the features you can expect.
The foundation also depends on app developers to build and grow a catalog of apps that users might expect.
This is a difficult task as most app developers are focusing on iOS and Android in order to earn money and very few are willing to give their time to bring killer apps to Ubuntu Touch.
Currently, the foundation's efforts are focused on the maintenance of Ubuntu Touch ; rebasing on 24.04, bringing support for VoLTE and 5G which are critical tasks.

With this in mind, it's easy to understand that, with a skeleton crew, it's very hard to fight all those battles at once.

We are also facing a "battle" within. This one is related to our users and is about "support".
This aspect of things has been brought up lately and some community members start to get fed up with it.
My understanding of the origins of the problem is that we needed to bring more people onboard with us to help:

porting to new devices
maintaining the OS
developing or maintaining apps

This effort to widen the community attracted also people that did not help with those tasks and generated support.
Ideally newcomers would learn from the elders and then help back newer users.
In reality it mostly falls back on the same highly motivated people which for some are also helping in porting, developing apps or maintaining the OS (sometimes all of the above).

So first of all I would like to thank all the people helping this amazing community.

But my goal today is to ask people to understand the situation we are in and to encourage them to help us out.

Ubuntu Touch and the UBports community have a lot to fight for and it will be really hard in the coming months.
So if you feel you can help us out a bit more, then please do.

We need skills to port or maintain current ports.
We need skills to maintain the OS, test it out and fix issues.
We need developers to maintain and create new apps.
We need money to keep paying the bills for infrastructure.
We need sponsors or crowdfunding to invest on some targeted features and give some money to people who already invest so much in this community.
We need volunteers to give back a bit of what they got from this community: support, moderation, communication, organization, management, lobbying... anything you think we lack of...

Complaining is natural and understandable but it's not helping... and we are in desperate need for help.