Ubuntu Touch Q&A 192 call for questions.

UBportsNews

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 192 is live this Saturday 13th June. If you can, please join us at the usual time of 19:00 UTC.
Before then, if you have any questions on or about Ubuntu Touch and UBports please post them below and we will do our best to answer them in the Q&A.

Remember that questions on porting to device **** or its status, and questions on bugs, will not be answered.

diego28a

@UBportsNews
Hi team! Thanks for all the hard work on the 24.04 (Noble) base.

With the migration to Qt6 and a much more modern Chromium WebEngine, WebApps are performing better than ever. We know that tools like Webber are community-driven and not official UBports core apps, but they rely heavily on the system's capabilities.

Historically, the lack of background/push notifications has been a blocker for web-based messaging apps. Now that we have a modern web base, what is the roadmap for Lomiri and the system's push services to support modern Service Workers or background execution for WebApps? Will we see a more native PWA integration down the road? Thanks!

nbdynl

@UBportsNews Thanks for all the work again guys. 24.04.2 and 26.04 already are in great shape. porting to Qt6 seems to pay off already.

I have a question about porting, we have a page dedicated to what is working on a device.
But having 2 devices i notice that there is a big difference in usability.

for example, the redmi note 9 pro does not completely support video features and voice calling.
and the fairphone 5 has issues with bluetooth connections for keyboards and mouse.

what is the organisations plan to future proof user experience across all supported devices,
and how can we as "users" help you guys?

uxes

@nbdynl said:

for example, the redmi note 9 pro does not completely support video features and voice calling.

what do you mean with that? no video and no voice calling? my miatoll calls and does videos just fine

nbdynl

Well, that's exactly the issue: it differs from port to port.

This merge request is an example of the same problem being solved for Surya devices, while it still remains unresolved on Joyeuse:

https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/community-ports/android10/xiaomi-poco-x3/xiaomi-surya/-/merge_requests/15

My last merge request, which was for something unrelated, never received a response from the person maintaining this port. That makes me think they may be busy, inactive, or have moved on to another device.

What makes this difficult is that building a port already requires a significant amount of effort, and maintaining it over time is another challenge entirely. Relying on volunteer porters to continuously maintain, improve, and enable new features is difficult and probably not something that can always be expected.

The same applies to Snap, Libertine, and Docker support. Not every device supports these features out of the box.

This is not meant as criticism of the porter. From a user perspective, though, I would have liked to know these limitations before purchasing my device. If I had known, I probably would have increased my budget and chosen a different device from the start.

One possible solution would be to rethink how port maintenance is organized. Many of these settings and features are simply Linux kernel options that have been disabled and could potentially be enabled across multiple devices. As it stands, if a porter or device community doesn't enable a feature, it remains unavailable on that device, while the exact same feature may be available to users of another device.

Moem

@nbdynl said:

From a user perspective, though, I would have liked to know these limitations before purchasing my device.

This is certainly one of UT's weak spots. What looks like a good device on paper, and a pretty safe gamble, may in fact be a dead end.

The problem is real, and I don't see any easy solutions. I think it comes with the territory of UT being a mostly volunteer based project.

nbdynl

I understand that, and to be clear, this isn't meant as a complaint or even an expression of frustration. In fact, I recently chose to buy a Fairphone 5 specifically because of its longer support horizon and the active development around it.

My question is more about how the UBports Foundation views this challenge in the long term. Are there already discussions about future approaches that could help address the growing complexity of hardware support? Or perhaps ideas within the community that could lead to a more sustainable solution while we preserve a unified experience across different devices?

I'm not so much interested in the current limitations, we all know those exist... but rather in the broader vision. How does the foundation see the path forward when it comes to maintaining convergence and a consistent user experience across all devices.

arubislander

@nbdynl said:

maintaining convergence

By 'convergence' in this instance I suppose you mean 'the same OS features across the different device ports"? Because people might mistake your meaning since that word is heavily in use for a specific features of the OS.

nbdynl

Well, yes, that is what i mean. However, it could also apply to desktop convergence, and even software convergence, if that's what you're referring to. I don't think this feature is broadly relevant yet, since only a limited number of devices currently support display output.

That said, I've seen some recent discussions about DisplayLink, and we already have an SSH client in the OpenStore, so I suppose we could try to improve that particular aspect of convergence in the long run as well.