@Flohack If you don't know there is not much chance of me knowing I knew my way around programing (machine code) the old Sinclair ZX81 but other than maintaining a basic website or two over the years and keeping our linux computers at home updated and working I've let that side of my knowledge get very rusty in the intervening 35+ years. I really appreciate the effort you folks are putting into maintaining and developing this OS. I use my phone daily and hope, when it finally gets too old, that there will be a good open source OS to run on my next one. Preferably UBPorts.

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense with my old BQ4.5 as full websites are ungainly at best. However as we move towards convergence then we may need the option to be able to select between a desktop or a mobile browser depending on what we want to do. Not that there is an urgent need for that now.

@Flohack list.Thanks for your reply. I have in the past had a good response from developers at the BBC regarding Linux compatibility. I wondered whether some websites demand an Android app because of something in UBPorts identifying the browser as running on Android or simply because that was their default assumption if we were not identified on their list.

@guru thanks for that.
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; Nexus 5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.102 Mobile Safari/537.36
Is this something we can edit?

Sites like the BBC contain multimedia that runs fine on Linux using HTML5. However trying to access things like BBC iPlayer radio or TV on my BQ4.5 fails as the website demands that I have to install the Android App. Any way of getting around this? By which I mean persuading websites to allow the HTML5 to be run by changing what they see as evidence that we are running Android not how do we get the App installed.

Could you have been caught up in the recent huge EE outage? I've got two sims fron different providers and they both seem to work fine before and after the recent update and the change over to UBports.

@Flohack it was simple but very slow as our telephone exchange is limited to only half a meg and that is before the signal has to travel down the rural copper wires. None the less it all worked and the old phone is up and running on UBports. Now what were all these passwords again I look forward to finding out what has changed and what needs to. My coding dates back to DEC10 mainframe and Sinclair ZX80/81 (apart from a bit of HTML late last century) so not sure how useful I can be. Only used Linux at home for the last 11 years (though stuck with MS windows at work).

I'm still happily using my old BQ E4.5 that I bought nearly 2 1/2 years ago as my everyday phone. It has proven reliable (never even had to do a factory reset). I wonder whether to stick with the preinstalled Ubuntu touch or to move to UBports. I'm not sure whether the updates are significant enough to make it worthwhile wiping the existing installation. Any thoughts?