Its there now!!!

I really do not like IBM but what they did in the 80ies was genius, and a path that many others should have followed: They designed the IBM-PC to be open for 3rd parties, and gave all the specs for hardware manufacturers. Clearly, because they could not do everything alone, but still it was key to the success of the PC.

If we would have again such a hardware company things would improve in months ;)

BR

@hans1977se Well theoretically the firmware together with the driver and the kernel (which is the only open source part) can do fancy things which we don´t know and cannot see. I don´t know details, but Edward Snowden could tell you more stories :)

And no we cannot remove the essential parts to talk with the hardware. There is no way around this. That´s also why some devices will not be able to be upgraded, they are stuck on a kernel version, because their drivers have been compiled against a certain kernel and libc. We can only remove java addons from the vendor, useless Dalvik stuff, and stuff for higher levels of Android that we dont use in general.

Mediatek is such an example of a vendor that does not disclose anything to us. We cannot even build the OS for the existing UBuntu 15.04 versions of the BQ devices for example. And we cannot upgrade them to 16.04 except probably the tablets.

Unfortunately UBuntu Touch is currently bound to this model. The advantage is that we can run it on much more phones (in theory) than if we would rely on custom drivers. I don´t even know if smth like this would be possible.

The approach of the Librem5 phone is by the way to have these hardware switches to disconnect the parts of the system where open source is not an option. Probably even thme cannot have an open-source baseband processor etc.

BR

@twinkybot No, these aren´t. There are no open-source drivers currently on the market for RIL, GPU, sensors etc. Reason among others is that vendors are afraid that the get sued for patent infringement, probably many vendors have stolen their hardware & software design from others ;)

BR

Just to mention a small group of developers is just now looking into implementing a Linphone App which will provide basic SIP support.

BR

Hello,

both CyanogenMod and Ubuntu Touch are using the low-level libraries of Android, so there is no difference to privacy. Actually we are not buildin "on" CyanogenMod, but just leverage their way of removing unnecessary stuff from the Android tree for a certain device.

BR Florian

Dear All,

tio release OTA-2 properly we need some new strings translated, fire up your rigs and help us :) - Please note that we still have some issues with the database locking, so saving translations is slow.

BR

@Glatorius The new camera app has resolution selection built in :)

Plus we got a bug for the webbrowser on the legacy devices, so we cannot ship it until this is resolved :)

@Mark Well I would say its definitely worth switching. For example we are upgrading the browser right now. You can do a simple backup with the magic device tool, then switch to UBports, then restore. You will have to reinstall all apps, but your data can be saved.

BR