Desperate guy Here
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Hi guys, I'm desperate. 8 months ago I bought a Volla22 phone with Ubuntu Touch as the OS. I liked the idea of having a daily phone with Linux since I use Linux Mint for work. However, using Ubuntu, I see that the appstore is sparse and there are practically no apps for Ubuntu Touch. What I use is the minimum, WhatsApp and Telegram, yet the apps on the store don't work, and WhatsApp and Telegram web are unusable on the phone. So I asked the Volla Help desk for help, and they sent me a guide to install VollaOS, but the guide doesn't work, it's not very clear and defined and often in practice things go differently.
Now, after two months of searching the web to get Volla OS on my phone, I've learned that Volla OS isn't all that great, and that many Volla OS users would like to switch to Ubuntu. If I had a magic wand, I'd keep Ubuntu, but the two apps I'm interested in aren't there. Furthermore, the Ubuntu Touch package manager doesn't seem to work like a normal Linux distribution in the terminal. Am I missing something? If I wanted to keep Ubuntu Touch, how could I get WhatsApp, Telegram, and a PDF reader?
Thanks everyone.
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Let's see. For Telegram, we have a decent native solution called TELEports.
For WhatsApp, WhatsWeb has recently been updated and it's now getting good reviews, so maybe it's time to try again? Alternatively, I hear some folks use a Matrix bridge to use the Matrix app Cinny for WhatsApp.
For PDFs, Document Viewer does the job for me but maybe you prefer Annotate or Sturm Reader.I hope this is helpful!
Furthermore, the Ubuntu Touch package manager doesn't seem to work like a normal Linux distribution in the terminal.
Well, yeah, it's not another Linux distro. Please don't try to use apt, you'll probably break something.
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As an addition to TELEports and Whatsweb, did you try as well to install Waydroid in Ubuntu touch? Native Whatsweb and TelePorts app for Ubuntu touch should do the trick for most day-to-day needs, and offer notifications. But having a fallback to official Whatsapp and Telegram in Waydroid may be usefull as a complementary solution, if you need some advanced features at some point.
In addition to those already mentioned, uWolf can be another solution for modern pdf reading, although if it's a local file you currently need to enter this url manually "file:///home/phablet" then browse to your file on disk. You can bookmark the url or even set it as homepage if you don't use uWolf for browsing. Hopefully in the future we will be able to directly open file with uWolf from file explorer app with content hub.
Make sure to keep your system and applications up-to-date as things are rapidly moving forward.
