Patreon is one of the methods to donate that is given on the ubports.com donation page. According to Patreon, 158 patrons are giving $US 1,148 per month to the UBPorts Foundation. Sure, that's not going to pay a salary, but, to me, it is a significant amount of money toward running servers and infrastructure. However, I don't know if that's true, because I don't know what the operating costs are. I am blindly donating because I want to be supportive, not because I am trying to pay an amount that I think the software is worth to me. What are the operating costs? If that was clear, maybe more people would be likely to donate. A graphic popped into my head: a thermometer where the level in red is the annual cost, and the red turns green from the bottom up as donations come in.

The question of charging a fee for FOSS is an old one. It cannot be easily answered. There's a lot of philosophical debate about it in the history of FOSS. To me, FOSS is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. A shining knight standing to face the history of industrial economies. I'm just saying that charging money doesn't just slowly smother UBPorts. It's no longer FOSS. It doesn't matter if you charge $US 10 or $US 1,000. It's no longer part of this amazing community of altruistic creators.

Do you want a fee to use Linux? Wikipedia? Every forum and website you use to troubleshoot the problem with that driver that doesn't quite work right in Linux in the latest new bare hardware you bought? When someone posts a solution to a problem in a forum, they do not charge money. They are freely giving their intellectual property. This is all part of this network economy that the Internet is enabling. To me, UBPorts is my best hope for a phone in this economy. I will do what I can to voluntarily give of my time and money.

@beta-break
The core app list includes calendar, but not contacts. The list described here includes Morph, which is not a core app, but does not include an email client, such as dekko.

I realize that there's a lot of work planned here (like, VoLTE), but I think that contacts and an email client should be added. Also, the list of core apps should be re-evaluated?

Thank you!

Finally, I've received the right phone. It is from Southwest Distributors, via Swappa. I should have followed the recommendation of the UBports site and gone there first. I could tell right away because one of the first steps after powering it up is asking about a SIM and giving the option for an eSIM. Verizon models don't offer that.

@kugiigi Two of the Motorola phones I've had use serveral acceleration gestures. For the flashlight it is two hacking motions. Two wrist twists opens the camera.

I'm now on my fourth Pixel 3a from Amazon or Ebay. Every vendor has send me the wrong phone. Wrong model, wrong size (I already bought case and screen protector separately), Verizon-locked, unknown vendor locked. The one I have now is the wrong color, although I don't care about that. From Ebay, it's supposed to be "Factory unlocked". I tell vendors that I want that, plus OEM unlocking. This time, I was able to put my Google Fi SIM card (that I use in a Google Nexus 4) in and activate it. That works, but the OEM unlocking is greyed out. I can't downgrade Android to 9 (step 1).

I haven't been able to find out the model of this (Regulatory Label is blank). I tell vendors that I want a G020G, following the advice elsewhere in the forum, but I can't determine that that is what I have. I'm waiting for a call back from Google to see if they will unlock it or tell me what the phone's status is.

I can't see that it supports eSIM, but from what I read it is supposed to. There's no eSIM IMEI listed or other evidence of it. Is this a clue as to what the phone is?

Thanks for any info you can provide me.

Did you recently buy it? Can you return it? I went through 4 phones from Amazon, Ebay and the site that the UBports buy link goes to, before I got one that was OEM unlockable. Others here have had similar experience. Sellers might not understand what it means. Try to find seller who will check that or at least give you the IMEI number so that you can contact Google Fi support to find out if it was originally sold in Google Store. Those are unlockable.

@uxes Correct Android? I had whatever it came with. 10.something. I wasn't running UT. I was only starting the process. I couldn't get data, so I couldn't unlock the phone with Xiaomi. I wasn't close to installing UT yet.

I'm interested in exploring working on this, so that CardDAV can be configured via the system-settings and more. I don't see it under the system-settings-online-accounts repository in Github. I've run Mobian on my Pinephone and all the usual Nextcloud services are available in the settings there. I guess the code, even the language, could be pretty different in this case between Mobian and UT. Still, I'd like to explore that. TIA.

I already support through Patreon. I encourage that approach. Maybe more visibility for that? As much as I don't like paying middle-businesses, and I personally think Patreon takes too large of a percentage, there they are.

I'm open to other voluntary ways of giving money.

I'm upgrading from a Google Nexus 4 to a Pixel 3a. I have a convergence dock for my Pinephone. Since the P3a uses USB-C, I'm wondering if anyone knows if the dock for the Pinephone will work on the P3a. TIA.

@arubislander
I bought this phone because I'd read about patches for MMS available through the QA Telegram channel. So i originally installed 2.x over Android. I immediately had out-of-space issues when i tried to install the MMS patches. Lionel said in Telegram that they routinely remove unneeded packages in order to make space under 2.x for QA tests.That shouldn't be necessary in order to contribute to QA.

So, there is a known problem with space. My guess is it needs to be expanded. I just saw fredl talk about porting Halium 12 to Pixel 3a and expand the size of root. This looks like a general issue.

There should be a mechanism in the installer or while running UT to free up space. Reinstalling Android and the UT again is a burdensome method. Anyway, that would just get me back to where I started, running 2.x without enough space to do QA.

@oldbutndy Yeah, a saw that, too. In wonder. I’m not in a Telegram channel for the OS itself, so I don’t know what their status reports are or release notes that describe changes. I can’t see what known bugs there are.

(I had reported not enough space on 2.x in Telegram before, but in that case, I was able to install 2.x but ran out of space when installing anything for UBports Quality Assurance.)

I think this phone has a lot of memory and the partition size (or whatever is the case) can be increased for 2.x.

I think there isn't enough space to install 2.x.

I will note that the screen with "Installing update" does come up after installing 1.x stable and booting. So, that's normal.

Bottom line: something is wrong with installing 2.x on OnePlus Nord N10 5G BE2026.

This time I rebooted a couple of times. While running 1.x daily I switched channels to 1.x stable. Rebooted a couple of times. Installed 2.x. Reboot. Again it is "Installing update".

I don't recall ever seeing "Installing update" after installing UT.

Now I'm back to the error "Failed to find block device for partionproduct_a".

So, this process of installing 2.x is unreliable.

When I installed 2.x, upon rebooting, I get "Installing Update". Where is it getting this update? Is that part of the 2.x install?

The Installing Update finished, the phone rebooted, and ended in Recovery mode.

It won't boot past the screen that says "The boot loader is unlocked..." AGAIN. At least I CAN shut it off now. But, it won't boot past that screen.

Installing 1.x again. "Installing Update" again. 1.x is installed.

Maybe the bottom line for all this is that today's daily 2.x is broken or it doesn't work on the N10 now.

Okay, I got back to the point where I could install 1.x and again after booting it up it said it is installing an update. I don't know if this is the daily update from when I started this day. That's when it downloaded the update but I didn't install it.

@oldbutndy I didn't try that, but why I was trying the procedure with unbricking using msmdownloadtool, there was an instruction to hold volume up and down and power together. That seems to have gotten my phone out of that unable-to-power-off mode. I thought for sure I'd try that already, since it's the way to get into the bootloader.

Trying to install 1.x again and the phone is hosed. I can't power it off. It is at screen that show

The boot loader is unlocked...
...
PRESS POWER KEY TO PAUSE BOOT

I hold the power key down for a minute and it doesn't power off.

When I plug it into my KDE desktop in this state I get a KDE alert that says

Halium initrd Failed to boot has been connected