Disclaimer: This guide is not designed to work with Focal!

Hey I recently started development for UbPorts and it felt quite overwhelming to get started. For this reason I decided to create a short guide for beginners who want to get started with development. I gathered many Useful resources and I hope it helps someone. I cannot promise that it is perfect though.

You can find it on aaron.place (currently down! Use https://web.archive.org/web/20220515161326/https://aaron.place/blogs/UbPortsPython.html intead.)

Hello everyone,
you may have heard that Dalton stepped back from his contract at the UbPorts fundation(more). With him leaving, the future of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A becomes uncertain. The Q&A has been part of community developement and information for 4 years now and I think it would be a bummer if it got lost, as it always was a great way to get an overview about what is happening in the foundation, developement and what is important at the moment.

Lets get to the point , I would love to learn more about how the Q&A was organized in the past, who decides what the future will look like and how we as the community or I as a single person can help to preserve the Q&A. I would also love to start a general discussion about the Q&A and what its future schould look like.

ps. I wish Dalton all the best for his future

Waydroid has come to a point where it is very usable on many devices. There still are some annoying things about it though that might be easy to fix for advanced users but not for beginners.

For that reason I started developing an app called WaydroidHelper. It is a qml + Python app that has scripts to:

• Hide Apps installed by waydroid one by one
• Add an Icon to the appdrawer that lets you stop waydroid (waydroid session stops)

Thinks I would like to add:

• A guided waydroid installer
• The ability to install and remove apk's through waydroid (?)
• The ability to sync contacts between Waydroid and UT (?)

The points marked with a (?) are where I need your help as I dont know how to achieve them yet.

Do you have other Ideas or tricks that should find its way into the app? If so it would be great if you can let me know down below.

@cliffcoggin Why would you be this rude. He is just suggesting an improvement. It might not be important to you personally but there are people who care about design (Thats why there is a design subforum.). I agree to @guru and think it is an inconsistency in the design. You may disagree but should stay friendly none the less.

@stanwood We just updated WaydroidHelper and now have an included "Waydroid Installer" that does what is explained here automatically. We hope that we can make Waydroid more accessible.

@flohack Hey, im the dev.

We currently have a big disclaimer in the app that explains the risk and lists theoretically supported and tested devices. You have to click a red button saying "I understand the risk" to even start the installer.

I plan to implement device verification but havent found time yet. I will add another warning to the openstore description asap.

@webmust Ive been thinking about creating a small backup application for UT esspecially because I also want to provide one in WaydroidHelper too.

No promisses though when this will happen. Might be a week might be a month or longer. Whenever I find time for it.

@stanwood I wrote a small app to make this process easier. It shows you all the apps that waydroid installed and lets you hide it by swiping from left to right and show it again by swiping in the other direction.

make sure to reload the appdrawer after any changes. That means scroll up all the way and swipe down. The changes should have taken effect now.

This is very much bodged together but I plan to add more functionality and add it to the openstore eventually.

Download: https://cloud.aaron.place/index.php/s/kd8FjCDsSWGTB4T

open the click with openstore to install

@messayisto this seems pretty straightforward at first glance. I will try to port it.

@nero355 Yo... you dont get the point. You dont have to like Electron/Flutter or whatever. UT is an open OS with a small community of developers. Discouraging people the way you do helps no one.

Electron might not be your choice of application. Fine.

Other people might like it and more options will just result in more devs being motivated to try stuff on UT.

Take my apps for example... Python + QML? An inefficient combination for sure, but it allowed me to write apps that help hundreds of people and I certanly wouldnt be writing them if someone like you would have discouraged me right from the get go and told me it was stupid when I first asked questions about it.

@Kamikaze Love to hear that things are looking good for the Fairphone 5, its my current daily driver and I would love to give it a try with UbuntuTouch

@developerbayman Sorry for the late response. My site is currently down to reduce server cost (Inflation hits us all). Here is the guide: https://web.archive.org/web/20220515161326/https://aaron.place/blogs/UbPortsPython.html

@ian I am not guaranteeing anything at all and a certain risk always remains when installing Waydroid, but we think that with the new update the risk of breacking something should be significantly lower because we updated the installer after Flo made us aware of a security Issue.

Both the Installer in Helper and the Guide here in the forum were adapted accordingly.

As I said though, no guarantees!

@opolork @AaronTheGuy@social.tchncs.de

@opolork what is ur username?

Hi everyone, a small off-topic post today. I was wondering who of you guys use Mastodon as I am always looking for new people to follow.

@mschmids Thank you for your feedback. There currently is a pull request pending that should fix the issue with appending. The other stuff will have to wait until I find time.

@applee I think that is a great proposal and Id love to help where I can. Why not work out a concept together with everyone that is interested and put something on paper? Maby we could organize a VideoConfrence or a thread (or both) to create a concrete Plan?

@alter Agreed! Why not take the Wikipedia approach and put a fat banner up that only disappears when the goal is reached. Sometimes you need to annoy people a bit to get them donating.

@john-silver I think cofunding is not really an option considering that the monetary resources of the foundation are also quiet limited. Either way I agree, that not everything has to be free of charge. Implementing something like paid apps is pretty hard to implement on UT at the moment I guess.