Bye everybody and thanks a lot to all those who are making UBports possible! I have been using Ubuntu Touch as daily driver since 2015 and have been following the UBports Q&A as well as this forum quite regularly. Sadly my only contributions have been some bug reports and spreading the word on social media.
I have finally given up this week and have switched to GrapheneOS on a new Pixel phone (it admittedly feels very strange to buy a Google phone for avoiding Google to spy on you...). Still hoping to getting back to 'real' Linux on my phone one day, but some of the pain points have grown too big - e.g. I am too dependent on mobile messaging via Signal/Axolotl, which has not been working for me for many months now - and seems as far from enabling video calls as ever. Also the Volla Phone still has some rather annoying shortcomings - crashes etc.
I am posting this not to spoil the mood but just to avoid leaving this great community silently without wishing the foundation, the team and all contributors the best of luck - please keep up the good fight!

Nice spec comparison of upcoming Linux phones: https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-phones/6827

I am a daily user of the Signal app and would be interested in learning if anybody from the team has had any further contact with OpenWhisperSystems regarding support for making the Ubuntu Touch Signal app more stable and feature-complete. @Flohack mentioned something along those lines in https://forums.ubports.com/post/6379 .

for all of you contributors to UBPorts!

Reply from Purism regarding the Librem 5 dev kits for UBports:

If you are in contact with the UBports developers then can you ask them to get in touch directly via an existing Purism contact? If you are a UBports developer then can you talk to your colleagues and find out what the status is from their perspectives?

My impression is that there are a very small number of development boards, but that most of them are already assigned to third party development groups. For some of those groups, the task of assigning the boards was left to the people in charge of those groups and I don’t know whether there was clarity about who should receive boards.

I have regularly been checking https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/10 to keep track of the progress of the Unity8+Mir upgrade. However I noticed that there has not been much change lately in that github project. Is this still the right place to look at?

Purism forum says:

I believe that two devkits should have arrived with UBports folks recently.

Beyond that, I don’t have any more information. I hope that the boards survived shipping and that the developers can do something interesting with them.

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-smartphone-final-specs-announced/

Bad press for Purism: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1133747-an-interview-with-zlatan-todoric-open-source-developer-former-purism-cto
(sorry for being slightly off-topic)

@adlinux , my Volla shows the exact same behavior on updates.

Signal! All chats, including group chats, end-to-end encrypted by default.

We all hope that Ubuntu Touch will continue its success and be much more widely used in the not-so-far future. With this comes the risk of becoming a relevant target for whomever wants to spread malicious functionality to other people's smartphones. How are you guys approaching the security topic? How does Ubports make sure that nobody smuggles anything into the distributed binaries (I am referring to the OS and core apps here - not so much the app store). Do ideas like reproducible builds come up during your conversations on this?

To avoid misunderstandings: I am a noob in the security domain and there is no critique whatsoever hidden in my question. It is just something which came to my mind when contemplating on the recent successes of the project (Ubports Foundation, Pinephone, Volla, ...).

Pine64 forum says:

Some of you may have already heard rumors about the PinePhone on podcasts or read about it in FOSS / tech press. Its true, we're making a Linux-only smartphone called the PinePhone based on the Allwinner A64, and it will strictly be running mainline Linux. Software development on this project has already began - UBPorts, Maemo Leste, PostmarketOS, Plasma Mobile as well as other developers have received early kits to get up to speed on the A64 SOC. Just in the past few days a lot of progress has been made on these early kits (and i mean A LOT!) and, as you will surely see in coming days, some of the aforementioned software is already running on-top of mainline kernel. We will likely have a functional demo at FOSDEM!

Software-related status debate is beyond the scope of this post - which should be obvious, given that the actual dev kits aren't even available yet - however I cannot resist but to include two pictures of KDE and Unity 8 running on the aforementioned kit, curtsy of Bhushan Shah and Marius Gripsgard from KDE and UBPorts respectively.

@RandomUser https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop

@pulsar33 Have you tried https://meet.jit.si ? Based on free software.

How do you see the chances for Ubuntu Touch offering full device encryption ... in the not-so-far future?

Hi, Alberto,

it is great to read that somebody is working on this!

I have to say though that your plan of dropping the EDS backend sounds like bad news to me: With my ubuntuphone I got contact and calendar sync between desktop and smartphone reliably working for the first time ever without using a provider like Google. Before switching to ubuntuphone I was using Android and never really got this working. I am currently using syncevolution on the command line for this which is not a very user-friendly but functional solution. I would be very grateful if you could make sure that any replacement of the current backend will only happens if the new approach provides the same set of features regarding synchronization.

Cheers!

Just stumbled over this discussion over at the purism forum - an interesting read, also referencing the Ubuntu Tourch Signal app: https://forums.puri.sm/t/signal-client-for-the-librem-5/2743/13

@kalle.kruse Ah, this has also been mentioned in the OTA3 wishlist thread: https://forums.ubports.com/post/4166

Then perhaps on more general terms: What will happen to all the feature requests in that thread?

Just tried out linking the Ubuntu Signal app (https://signal.org/blog/standalone-signal-desktop/) with Ubuntu Touch Signal app - works like a charm!

Thanks a lot, Aaron for taking over maintenance of and adding new features to the Signal app!

Only hiccup so far: During my first tests messages I wrote on the desktop did not all make it over to the mobile app.

A nice overview of sites helping with funding: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding