Best posts made by poVoq

IMHO the currently missing piece for UT as a daily driver Full Nextcloud integration is really the way to go.

So qtcontacts-sqlite seems to have landed in a branch:

https://github.com/ubports/address-book-app/commit/db8681e0e694a03d6c95632dabb4910719925c95

@mardy great to see some further progress on this. You think CardDAV might make it for OTA12?

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-arm-alpha2-with-lomiri-pinephone/39561

Super interesting development as a lot of the things UT will need in the future (when finally based on 20.04+) can already be implemented and tested on Manjaro.

Just found this:
https://www.peterspython.com/en/blog/developing-ubuntu-touch-apps-with-python-using-pyotherside

Seems like a nice start

Pyotherside will also work with qt quick controls 2?

@AppLee said in What do you think? Use only Lomiri as poweruser?:

When I read your post I think that you want us (as a community) to bail because it's a long way until UT is polished and with many useful and fun apps. But I don't think that we should stop because that is something I want and many others too.

No, I don't want the community to bail. I like UT overall, although I like Lomiri more than some other parts.

But what I see is that this community is struggleing to maintain a lot of the stuff Canocial developed back then and which made sense for their buisiness case (taking a cut from the app-store sales like Google does). And a lot of this baggage from Canocial times does not only cause a maintainance burden (by now it is technical debt despite some nice things about it) but actively turns away new contributors. Yes some of those might be tinkerers and are not primarily thinking about the use of UT as a daily driver phone, but as with all healthy open-source communities there is always a mix of different motivations and the sum is larger than its individual parts...

Unless you want to do the port yourself it is probably better to wait for the PineTab or get a already compatible one like the old Nexus7.

For porting youself, look for LinageOS support and Android7 or maybe soon 9.

@trwidick really? mms sending is a thing now? In my entire life I have maybe send an mms once by accident and I don't think I know anyone who uses those either.

And if you think your life will depend on it, then better not use a smartphone at all. They break easily and run out of battery quickly.

Awesome. This is probably one of the future must have apps on UT. Thanks a lot

I have about one year experience running the OnePlus3 (without t) as a daily driver.

It works with the same caveats @NoelFlantier described, but the port is abandoned and quite honestly I would not recommend getting one to use with Ubuntu Touch. But if you happen to have one already, sure give flashing it a try and maybe you will like it.

KaiOS is a quite interesting commercial fork of FirefoxOS and there is a FOSS version of it called GerdaOS (https://gitlab.com/project-pris/system ).

The interesting part is that all apps are webapps like on FirefoxOS, so if the right version of the Gecko engine was made to run on UT, it should be possible to run KaiOS apps on UT.

Given the high number of devices sold with KaiOS in India/Africa etc. there are actually some potentially interesting official apps for it, for example WhatsApp.

And it might be easier to get working than Anbox, given the low resource use of it.

Here is the link of the unofficial community run app-store with a lot of details about it:
https://sites.google.com/view/bananahackers/home

@Keneda yeah, definitly. That is one way of seeing it, as I tried to explain already in my first post.
But it is an uphill battle, and maybe too amitious for a small community project like Ubports.

And then there is the fact that in the months since I joined this community and started developing some simple apps for it, I have seen a lot of people (with a traditional Linux background) come and go again for reasons that basically boil down to feeling unwelcome and constantly running into (what they perceive as) artificial limitations of the system.

I also had high hopes that the PinePhone would bring in more developers for UT. And while the final verdict is still out on that, my current gut feeling based on discussions around the PinePhone outside of this direct community is that because of the above reasons the vast majority (of the developers at least) prefer to use a more traditional Linux base and would rather port Lomiri to it than putting up with the uphill battle in UT.

That said, this isn't really a major problem if this community's majority of users and its current developers feels it is a tradeoff they are willing to make. But I wanted to raise this topic as I feel it is not being openly discussed and people fail to understand why UT isn't attracting nearly as many new users and developers as everyone would hope (of course under realistic assumptions, not claiming it could topple Android or such).

GPU accelleration and webgl support in the browser and qtwebview is being worked on?

So I had a closer look at the upstream situation as @mardy has pointed out. Sadly it seems that there is a bigger version incompatibility with the system SailfishOS is using and given the total lack of activity on that part since several months it doesn't look like waiting for upstream to catch up is going to work.

Any other suggestions given that forking upstream is probably not feasible right now? Is there maybe a way to utilize the already implemented google api in a creative way? Edit: or maybe easier: make a small app as a frontend for SyncEvolution similar to this one for Maemo: https://openrepos.net/content/holgern/syncevolution-gui
Edit: apparently are is a newer GUI for SailfishOS: https://openrepos.net/content/ovekaaven/syncevolution
See also: https://wied.it/blog/caldav-and-carddav-sync-with-jolla-phone-syncevolution-and-zimbra-zcs-owncloud-and-ssl.html

Seems a real pity that both Apache and Ubports seems to have dropped Cordova support for UT.

There is an slightly fixed version here:
https://github.com/bhdouglass/cordova-ubuntu (based on Cordova 4.8?)
From @bhdouglass

and an App that still uses it:
https://github.com/milikhin/seabass
https://open-store.io/app/seabass.mikhael

And according to the official Cordova documentation support was dropped sometimes between version 7.x and 9.x:
https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/7.x/guide/platforms/ubuntu/index.html
https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/apps/html-5/guides-cordova-guide

I know that UT has it's own simple way of running webapps, but running offline HTML5 apps with some advanced features is quite a pain in it, and many advanced web-apps (uMastonauts etc.) are trying to make their own qt based wrappers, basically re-implementing a large part of what Cordova could offer.

In addition Cordova apps are much more easily portable between platforms (Android / iOS) and there is even a recent electron based Desktop support for it. Yes, hybrid apps have disadvantages, but they also have many positive aspects... no need to discuss this here

So maybe this would be worth picking up again and maybe even get upstream support? I guess they mainly dropped it because there was no maintainer for it, so is there anyone in this community interested (and with the skills)?

@Flohack said in Is Ubports still phoning home?:

We count the number of active devices by device type and release channel they are on, thats all.

Is that information actually available somewhere?

With the Pinephone potentially also supporting convergence through the display port, is this currently a bit neglected feature going to see more official support? Are there things that work better/differently with Libertine etc. on the Wayland based Pinephone in regards to convergence?

Found the source code: https://github.com/accumulator/syncevolution-sailfish

@branja6 said in Wish list : which apps do you need?:

Also, it would be amazing if someone could port KDE connect (or GSConnect).

There is a Kirigami version for Plasma Mobile. Needs a newer qt version though.

@AppLee said in I'd like explanations about the different types of port ?:

The open store is managed by the UBports foundation so you can trust it to install your click packages.

This is not good advise. Anyone can upload apps to the open-store and the confined apps are only getting a very basic automatic check. As for the unconfined ones, yes they seem to get checked manually by foundation members, but they are also much more risky to install.

I don't want to spread FUD, and so far all apps I tried from the open-store seemed fine, but this kind of app distribution model is inherently untrustworthy (like the Playstore and the iOS appstore as well) and people should be cautious what apps they install from such a channel.

They don't claim it to be daily driver ready, just good enough for many uses.

I guess with the camera sort of working, that was the needed milestone?

Quote:

The Ubuntu Touch image that will ship on the PinePhone will be highly functional, but not necessarily 'daily driver'ready - depending of course on your requirements. It will support all core phone functionality, such as outgoing and incoming voice calls, SMS texts and LTE. In addition, it will have GPS location and GPU hardware acceleration for the system and its apps. That said, some features - notably camera support, battery life conservation and USB Host [that means plug and play for perhipherals such as mice] will still be under active development at the time of shipping.