A common reason to switch to Ubuntu Touch is to become less dependent on Google. On vivid, Dekko is a decent email client that can handle different email providers. Sadly, the app doesn't work on xenial and the developer @DanChapman has indicated that is is challenging (to say the least) to port Dekko to 16.04. Make no mistake here about my esteem for Dan, he has done, and as I understand it continue to make great things for the UT platform.

My goal with this thread is to make a call for a working xenial email client, which I think should be a core app (Dekko or something else). Being such an essential feature on a modern smartphone, I think a native email core app is necessary for UT and UBports to gain traction outside of a small group of enthusiasts.

Thanks to Rudi Timmermans and his Gmail app, I am able to use xenial as a daily driver. I am annoyed by Google, as are many people in this community, but for the time being Gmail (or google apps email) is my only option if I want to read emails on my UT phone.

I am not a developer myself, but I try to help out as much as I can testing things and filing bugs where appropriate. I would really like more people to chime in on this request and enable UT users to break free from Google as much as possible if they like.

All the devs that are working so hard to make Ubuntu Touch such a great mobile OS have my full respect and I understand that moving to 16.04 must be the number 1 priority right now. But, pretty please (with sugar on top), could we gather some clever brains to bring Dekko or some other general email app to Ubuntu Touch!?

@unisuperbox
I have a few questions:

1. It is getting longer between the 16.04 devel updates (at least on Turbo). Also, the Backlog Milestones are not seeing much action. Is it not just updated or are development resources used elsewhere?
2. When can we expect a new test version of Anbox? @mariogrip mentioned on the last Q&A that he has a new version with working mobile connectivity.
3. Developer interest to recompile apps for xenial seems limited at the moment. What kind of signals do you get from the dev community on this? Is it too difficult? Aren't there enough devs with xenial phones to test their apps? Other reasons?
4. I know there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that we normal users can't see, but sometimes it is difficult to not get the impression that development has stalled somewhat. That is especially true when there is little or no action on Github and no devel updates for 16.04 for a while. Is this a matter of lack of resources to update forums, Telegram etc or just the fact that development is actually moving slower at times?
5. There was also talk about a new webbrowser app for xenial on the last Q&A, what is the status on this?

What are the future milestones of UBports? Have you moved the milestones from Github (empty since OTA-8) or aren't there any?

What is going to happen when the 16.04 backlog is empty? Will there be an RC channel or will you just continue working towards a stable OTA?

Any news on the calendar and clock apps, that keep crashing in xenial?

@unisuperbox
I am aware of this dilemma and I try to be as humble as I can in my request, but maybe if we raise the awareness of this issue we could attract more developer interest. If I had the developer skills, I think I would feel pressed to help out in some way. Unfortunately i don't possess those skills.

Some people have suggested to not read emails on the phone. It is a compelling thought, but for some of us mobile access to email is important to fulfill our jobs.

I don't have a thought out solution for this, but would it be possible to use some of the monetary contributions to UBports for this purpose?

@Flohack
I can confirm now that camera and gps works - awesome!

While I am at it, I also post links to a couple of vidz showing the Pro 5 performance compared to OPO (albeit with the older vivid).
https://youtu.be/c3-Y397v5XE
https://youtu.be/_USe3kKhd74

@lakotaubp
Your response was a little too quick, this thread is about 16.04, not 15.04. I have already switched to xenial on my Pro 5 and was sharing my experience so far. uVolman is not available for xenial yet.

Working fine on OPO 15.04, but not on Pro 5 with 16.04. Brings up the account screen on the latter, but can't choose or input an account. Only local notes work.

I too had problems with the built-in nextcloud calendar sync on my Pro 5. As I already had nextcloud contact sync working (through bash scripts), I deleted my nextcloud account on the device and added the account through syncevolution from the terminal (similar to my contact sync).

I am now running a bash script manually for two-way sync of contacts and calendar.

However, probably after an OTA update (I am on devel), my calendar sync started giving errors. After deleting the syncevolution database and config for the nextcloud calendar and recreating them, sync works fine again.

The one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to run a syncevolution cron job. It seems that the X server requirement is preventing running these commands in the background. But syncing manually doesn't take that long, so that's what I will use for now.

@hummlbach I want to chime into this too. I will give you more info, but right now not on my PC and difficult to give logs. I am syncing with Nextcloud accounts, and calendar has been a bit of 'hit and miss' .

I am kind of curious about which desktop OSes the UBports core team members are using and why.

What are the future milestones of UBports? Have you moved the milestones from Github (empty since OTA-8) or aren't there any?

I went back to OPO as my daily driver a few days ago. It has been while since I used it daily as I have had Pro 5 as my main device for some time.

Now, with the OPO on the devel channel, I can conclude that battery performance is pretty poor. Today, I took it off the charger (fully charged) at 06:40am, have done a couple of phone calls and some e-mailing with Dekko. That aside, very light use. I have all radios enabled (and bluetooth connected to my Pebble smartwatch), but have mostly been on WiFi. At 12:40, the battery was down to 40%, which equals an average hourly drain of 10%. That is considerably worse than my Pro 5 under similar conditions.

@lakotaubp Yes, switching to devel fixed it. I may have time to go back to RC during the weekend. If so, I will report back.

@Lakotaubp Thanks, that did it! GPS kicked in right a way.

I reverted back to my OPO today as there has been a regression in the call sound on the Pro 5. Both are now on xenial RC 2018-W48.
While setting up OPO again, I noticed that GPS location is not working. I get "GPE denied" in e.g. uNav. Is this a known issue or should I report it?

I can add that I get "Access error" in SensorsStatus.

Does anybody know how Dekko handles spam? For some reason I get a good amount of replies to my own e-mails caught in Dekko's spam folder. They seem to end up there instead of in the gmail spam or the spam handled by Thunderbird on my PC.

@luksus I am also really interested in getting Kodimote working again, it was such an excellent app. I'd be more than willing to test it for you, should you get it running.
Thanks