Status update on Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x, March/April 2025

peat_psuwit

Apologize for the late update this time. Let's get into it:

For everyone: the next Ubuntu Touch release will be called 24.04-1.0

You'll notice that this status update has a different headline format. After a discussion with UBports Foundation Board of Trustee (BoT) and with the community in general, we've decided on naming the next Ubuntu Touch release based on Ubuntu 24.04 as "Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0". 24.04 signifies the base Ubuntu version we're based on, and 1.0 represents whether it's a major upgrade or it's a minor update.

For now, the system-image channel will still be called utnext/{arch}/{hybris|android9plus|mainline}/daily. We will provide more updates on system-image channel in the future.

For app developers: it's now possible to build against Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x

Finalizing on versioning scheme means we're now able to finalize the name of Click framework. The new framework is called ubuntu-touch-24.04-1.x, with -qml variant for QML-only applications and -papi for applications without QML part. Due to the limitation of the Click file format, the AppArmor policy version is 2404.1.

Support in Clickable has been added in the recently released version 8.3.0. This means that if you specify the correct framework and AppArmor policy version, Clickable will choose the correct Docker image by itself and will produce Click packages compatible with 24.04-1.x series.

Open-Store will not yet accept applications built against Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x, as the framework is not quite stable yet. However, it's stable enough for developers to compile and test their applications against newer versions of libraries (such as Qt 5.15) available in Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x.

We intend to maintain full app compatibility between minor updates, but the same can't be said on major upgrade even when we stay on the same Ubuntu version. However, in practice the app compatibility on the same Ubuntu base version should be possible, and we'll try to maintain backwards compatibility where it makes sense.

For app developers: Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x will support apps built against Ubuntu Touch 20.04

Related to my last point, it turns out that it's relatively easy to maintain compatibility with apps built against Ubuntu Touch 20.04, with only a couple of compatibility libraries added to Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x. So, we've decided to maintain compatibility with applications which use ubuntu-sdk-20.04 framework and its variants.

This applies to most phones which has a modern 64-bit ARM processor (this applies to all devices which we currently have stable releases of Ubuntu Touch 20.04). On older phones with 32-bit ARM processor, due to a large-scale transition in Ubuntu and Debian (64-bit time_t transition), this is not possible, and compatibility will be limited to QML-only apps which use -qml variant of framework.

Status of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x

At the moment, a few key items still has to be done, including but not limited to:

Fix MMS and contacts/calendar sync.
Re-test push notification and hotspot to ensure they actually work.
Re-building our core applications against the new framework.
Update our artworks to go with the new Ubuntu icon, introduced at part of Ubuntu 22.04.
A more streamlined mechanism to upgrade Ubuntu Touch major releases.
Infrastructure-side work to support the new Ubuntu Touch release scheme.

We still need help in many of these items. If you're interested in lending hands, please reach us on our Telegram group.