Hi,

I just wrote a PDF reader based on Chromium PDF engine.

It's pretty dummy, written in 30 minutes. But quite useful (at least for me) given the limitations of Document viewer, and that sturmreader is currently broken on noble.

I think it will greatly benefit from Qt6 upgrade, when it comes, because of improvement of the engine in chromium.

It is published in the openstore:

https://github.com/pparent76/chromiumpdf

Regards,
Pierre.

I've succeeded in opening the keyboard when editing text in signal-desktop !!!!

I could do it reusing the work of @ChromiumOS-Guy in uWolf!

I can officially send signal messages from a native Ubuntu Touch app, without Waydroid!

Even though for now it's not convenient , since keyboard hides the text area, and the enter button of the keyboard somehow does not trigger sending the message, and the "send" button in signal is hidden until you expend the editing area. But still very usable.

For now everything is messy, but I will try to make it available soon (I think it should be possible to do a click package, but I'm not sure yet)

Ps: Note that I could do it with Mobian version only for now.

Hi,

Just wanted to share that VLC 4 (not yet released) has an interface very close to VLC for Android.

I will be a very good candidate to port to Ubuntu Touch. The interface would probably be usable as such, but with few minimal patches to the interface it could probably be near perfect on the phone screen.

I don't have time to do that now, but probably later (possibly when release officially)

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that I contacted the in-development French identity mobile app, to ask them for interoperability, and remind them their duty to make sure public service is available for everybody, and that their role was not to enforce the choice of mobile OS of their citizens.

https://france-identite.gouv.fr/

Surprisingly I got a pretty open and positive reply, apologizing that their app was not compatible with my OS (Ubuntu Touch), and saying they shared the goal of interoperability, and would study that with the development team what was possible. I did not expect such a positive answer, although I don't know if anything concrete will get out of this.

As a side note I wonder why for this kind of app, with a real need of interoperability, they don't use more Qt, because from what I understand Qt allows to develop apps for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux desktop, Linux mobile (Ubuntu Touch, Sailfishos, Mobian, postMarketOs, pureOs, ect...), all at once, with only few custom things to go for each platform. Any thoughts on that?

Hi,

Today I just figured why not try:

sudo snap install signal-desktop

And I realize it just works! This is crazy. With this simple command I can link my device and see my chats. Well it is certainly not a responsive interface (but not terrible either, there's just the left menu coming in the way) and the keyboard does not show for now. But I can consult messages, and this is major.

It means:

1°) We can certainly create quite easily a version of Signal-Desktop that is adapted to mobile display (with few patches to the interface to make it responsive), and that we can get a full-fledge signal client on Ubtunu touch, that way.

2°) That Mir2.0 will certainly help with that.

Ps: I guess the first easy thing to make it usable as a consul-only stuff is adapt the scale, which I guess must be easily doable.

Anyway after all the investigations that I've made I'm extremely confident that we'll be able to have a fully responsive client based on Signal-Desktop landed in the openstore within few month. I see exactly how to make it perfectly adapted to the phone Interface like whatsweb. (Funny enough it is possible to use a modified version of the js script of whatsweb to make the interface responsive, because the interface has an extremely similar structure. )

It's not anymore a question of "if" but a question of "when". But there are few tedious tasks in the way, and I need to go little by little, because I can't dedicate all my time to this.

Of course I'm open to any offer for help and testing!

I've been able to recompile Signal-Desktop from source and apply my responsive script.

It is available in the Openstore alongside these other improvements:
-Fix startup from OpenStore
-Fix open url externaly
-Fix battery problem
-Fix double window problem

There still are some keyboard issues, it's probably the next thing I will work on.

First of, thank you so much for the development on Ubuntu Touch, it is becoming amazing!

I have a question about Wayland/Xmir apps (e.g uWolf, Signal-desktop, Snap apps) in the context of the upcoming Mir2.0

Will you consider implementing any of the following, to polish experience with Wayland apps:

• Standard desktop notifications showing as UT notifications (with sound, vibration, status led, notification panel).
• Easy Import/export files from content-hub by having a custom xdg-desktop-portal for content-hub.
• Open url externally, by making an URLdispatcher app as default desktop browser.
• Review and possibly adapt apparmor profiles to make sure they don't prevent confined Wayland/Xmir apps from accessing the hardware the way they normally do it (GPU ,microphone, camera, ,...), when they should be allowed to access it. (Eg: Signal-Destkop can access microphone when unconfined, but not when it has the confined + microphone profile.)

Would you need/accept some help to do that?

@AppLee

They have not reached out to me again, but I would say every french citizen that use UT is entitled to contact them about this concern and the more they receive requests about that, the more they are likely to take it seriously. And I guess it is also possible to send them a message in the name of the fundation with an offer for assistance on the technical side.

https://france-identite.gouv.fr/contact/

Ps: By the way an argument that seems efficient to draw their attention lately, in the current context, is stressing that by not being inter-operable (as they are legally obliged) they are effectively offering a duopoly to 2 American companies, and preventing any potential alternative from emerging.

Craziest thing:

The calls are partially working out of the box!!!!
Which means we can certainly get calls working one day!

I really think that ideally there should be two distinct permissions for the apps:

• Foreground Microphone: The app can only access the microphone when it is foreground, that would be sufficient for most apps.

• Background Microphone: That would be usefull for only a small minority of very trusted apps , like phone apps that may need to maintain a call while the phone is suspended.

But it's very different to give the opportunity to spy on the microphone at any moment which is a critical permission, and to allow the app to use the microphone while on foreground which is what most app would need and is way less critical.

Hello everyone,

I realized a privacy concern about microphone that concerned unsuspended whatsweb, and whatsnew, but that could possibly concern many other webapps, or even regular apps.

The concern is that when running those webapps with microphone permission allowed and unsuspended to get notifications, then the subjacent website (in that case whatsapp) can effectively spy on your microphone at any moment, while your phone is suspended and the screen turned off, without you even being notified about that.

I'm going to see what I can do, on the application side, but it's not easy as it seems chromium engine does not allow easily to switch on and off the microphone in the webview, whether we are using electron or on Qtwebengine. You can chose to give or not the permission for the microphone, but when it's given it's hard to revoke without reloading the whole application.

Here are some possible features that could be useful, on the side of the OS:

• Add an icon to the systray when an Application is recording the microphone as KDE does.
• Add an option to disable the microphone for all apps (except maybe the phone app) when the phone is suspended.
• Or Even add an option to automatically diable the microphone for apps that are not in foreground (maybe except if they have a background microphone authorization)
• Add some tools for the apps themself to be able to know wether or not they are recording, and enable/disable or mute/unmute the microphone for themself a the level of pulseaudio. This should be accessible even for a confined app, and through shell command so that is universal.

Any thought on that?

I've put the logo on the french version of wikipedia, It can be reused for other languages:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch

@gpatel-fr

Nice thank's! Is there a license for those artworks?

Hello,

Is the logo available as SVG somewhere? It could be useful for wikipedia pages. Especially this page:

https://liliputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ubuntu-touch.jpg

Thank you

@DJac

Do you mean that using whatsnew would have an impact on the keyboard including when using other apps after? I really don't think that it's likely to be possible.

Hello, @pringlemingle

We currently have Ubuntu Touch 24.04, which is way more modern and functional that Ubuntu 16.04, and has a more up-to-date app catalogue. It really has improved a lot, at least for my own use. However it's not compatible with all devices, old devices may not have an upgrade. In this post you can see all device that have received the upgrade to 24.04: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/ubuntu-touch-24-04-1-0-release-3973

So if you want to try newest version unfortunately you will have to buy a phone that is compatible (Used phones can be less expensive). I'm not sure what is the "best" device. Fairphones have the reputation of working very well, Vollaphone devices are sold with Ubuntu Touch natively installed by the manufacturer, Community devices like OnePlus Nord may be more affordable if bought used or refurbished. But I guess many phones of the list offer very good experience.

Here are the pdf readers you have on UT 24.04: Sturm reader, Chromium PDF, PDFjs, Document viewer, Annotate. Not sure what is the best it depends on your need. I'm personaly using Chromium PDF that uses the PDF engine from chromium. But it's my own app so I'm not neutral here.

@DJac

On older version of UT I had this problem of the keyboard crashing, when imputing certain words, and when certain words were computed as suggestion, especially words with special characters. But it's been a long time that it is solved for me. May it be that?

@DJac

Whatsnew it's specific as it is a xWayland app, and it may not be perfect keyboard-wise, although I personally don't experience much instabilities, a bit of flickering may happen for me at the very moment of sending the message or selecting the edit area, but this is very fast and not disturbing at all.

But if it happens as well with other system apps, well strange.

@DJac

What device are you using? What sub-version of 24.04 specifically? With what app does the problem appear?