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 :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:, 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.

@bruswilis I would reccomend the aurora store from fdroid instead. ApkPure has had serious security issues in the past.

@aarontheissueguy said in Login screen/Code input Design:

@purplevvay Still looks great though, @CiberSheep and @AppLee mentioned a a few valid points on why the current login is used and what should be kept in mind when thinking about a redesign. Do you guys think that something like the above design might be an option for UT?

Maybe a user button could be positioned like this

Just to explain the solution if someone stumbles across this with the same question:

use sys to add "lib/python3.8/site-packages" to path. note that you not need to "../" out of the src directory. The end result looks like this:

import sys
sys.path.append('lib/python3.8/site-packages')

You might need to change the Python version

@purplevvay I was quite motivated to continue tinkering with qml and made this work. Note that this is very much a hack rather than a real code intended for real use:

https://aaroncloud.ml:8018/index.php/s/KKRGciomQG5cozF

!Solved (does this work here?) I was able to find a solution by making several changes to my code and reading many.. many.. logs and documentations. If you want to have a closer look at them I recommend taking a look at GitHub but ill try to break it down here anyways:

1. Read and write permissions. This gives enough information.
2. Non existent directories need to be created manually I added a python function to do that.
3. You cant have anything outside of your functions except import stuff because it will cause an error.
4. Some smaller formatting problems.

I might create an UpToDate beginners guide on this topic because there werent many detailed all in one guides about this topic.

A summary of this thread:

This thread discusses many different ways on how the design of the Login screen of UT screen could be improved. The whole conversation got pretty big thus, here is a small summary on Ideas, wishes and approaches.

What is to consider when redesigning the Login?

• The design needs to be convergent (usable in desktop and mobile mode)
• The design should look good in light and dark mode as there is no way to incorporate theming well.
• The design should not duplicate the look and feel of Android or iOS
• The design needs to be usable as good with a pin as with a passphrase

Which designs have been discussed so far?

@purplevvay made many mock-ups for different design Ideas, and we borrowed some from the ICE thread as well:

1.

• close to the current design
• original Keyboard is used
• slight transparency
• Input field based on login method
• Emergency is missing

2.

(my personal favorite)

• repositioned input
• bigger user Icon above the text input
• Original keyboard is used
• No design changes based on Input method
• Very universal between light and dark mode
• transparency for default user and input
• blurred background

3.

• full screen pin pad
• extra click required for keyboard
• not very convergent
• modern
• a mobile experience people are used to

I created a click dummy for this design:
https://aaron.place:8018/index.php/s/ot9SEG5FWfH2nJE

4.

These designs are more or less a variation of the designs in 2. but uses a custom version of the keyboard.

How far have we come to implement this our selves?

I have been able to tweak unity/lomiri to my liking, but we are not really close to anything that could be proposed in a pull request.

To @CiberSheep and the rest of the design team:

What do you think of our Ideas and mock-ups? Do you think this is something that should be added to UT? How could we further help you to turn this into reality? Do you have other thoughts?

To anyone:

If you are interested in turning this into reality, I would be happy to give you a small gift card as a thank-you

@messayisto
Progress !

Thank you for all that you have done for our community. Make sure to take all the time you need to recharge or find a new passion alltogether.

You are the reason I stuck with UT and started developing for it. Thank you for that.

There will be a special place in the heart of the UbPorts community for you .

@aarontheissueguy I published a first version of the app on Github: https://github.com/Aarontheissueguy/WaydroidHelper

It currently can do 2 things:

• Show and Hide apps
• Add a "Waydroid Stop" app to the drawer

If you want to try it you can download this .click package and open it with the openstore: https://cloud.aaron.place/index.php/s/ftfLL7XJcGStoCa

You really shouldnt be able to break anything with this app. With that being said there has not been much testing. Use it at your own risk. It would be great if you could let me know if things work as expected. ( @ruditimmer )