Two years ago to this day, Canonical announced the discontinuation of Ubuntu Touch. But, you know, as a valued community member, that we have all worked hard to keep Ubuntu Touch alive and the project is stronger than ever.

We are proud to announce that UBports is now about to be granted the status of an official foundation that is recognized by the authorities in Berlin!

Read our official announcement here:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blog-1/post/it-s-official-the-ubports-foundation-is-ready-for-launch-215

Thank you for all of your support, and we look forward to even better years to come.

TL;DR

• The revised Unity8 and Mir 1.x are coming in OTA-12
• You may wish to switch from the devel to rc release channel on any devices you're using daily.
• We might need to rewrite history on some git repositories. If this happens, we will keep a tag named xenial-before-2019-edge-merge to preserve the history.

The rest

We've been talking about "the Edge merge" for a while, and I understand that it is a rather opaque term to many people. I hope I'm able to answer your questions about what "the Edge merge" really is.

In short, what we'll be doing over the next few days is merging code which currently deploys to our Edge channel into branches which deploy to our normal release cycle. That releases daily into devel, which gets promoted to rc, which in turn gets promoted to stable. The next update on our stable channel will be OTA-12.

In order to understand why this is important, first I'll differentiate Edge from the normal release cycle. Ideally, most of our maintenance and feature work gets deployed into our xenial repository. This repository is used, along with the default Ubuntu repositories, to build the Ubuntu Touch images which land in devel. The Edge images are built with the xenial_-_edge repository overlayed on our xenial repository, allowing us to test large migrations before they impact a large number of users. So, at a base level, Edge is just devel with newer or more experimental packages laid over it.

Currently, we are using the Edge repository to test a huge migration away from Mir 0.24 and Unity8 from 2015 - as deployed in Ubuntu Touch up until now - to Mir 1.x and Unity8 from 2017 - the latter had begun to neglect phone users in an attempt to bring it to the desktop faster. That neglect caused a large number of issues which needed to be fixed. Having these changes built into images for every device every day (in Edge) for months has allowed us to iron out most of these issues.

We will also need to rewrite git history on the xenial branch in some cases, as the phone and desktop platforms diverged enough to prevent them from being merged cleanly. In these cases, we will save the old xenial branch in a tag called xenial-before-2019-edge-merge to ensure the history is preserved.

During this time, we will pause updates to the devel channel for all devices. This will prevent you from receiving an update which could be very broken and, possibly, render your device unbootable. If you don't want to come right onto the bleeding edge when we re-enable those updates, now is a good time to switch to rc or stable using the UBports Installer (don't check the option to wipe your device) or by heading to "Settings -> Updates -> Update Settings -> Channels".

Ubuntu Touch will have many fixes after this merge is finished, but it will also be broken in some new and interesting ways. Our goal as we reach OTA-12 is ensuring that the transition from OTA-11 is smooth. This will involve fixing those new and interesting issues.

Hello everyone,

I'm pleased to report that the first Release Candidate image in the OTA-12 cycle will ship tomorrow (Wednesday, February 12).

RC 2020-W07 image will be the same as what users in devel have today. Please see our open issues board to find what to expect when you update: https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/15

For users of the rc channel, this will begin the weekly release cadence anew. You will find a new update waiting for you in System Settings every Wednesday.

For users of the devel channel, you will see no changes to the daily release cadence.

This brings us closer to releasing Stable OTA-12.

As always, we rely on our users of the devel and rc channels to discuss with each other about interesting findings they have, then move those findings into good bug reports. You can learn more about reporting a bug on Ubuntu Touch at Bug reporting on the UBports Documentation.

Thank you to everyone who has tested, filed, and fixed issues with Ubuntu Touch and the new Unity8 to help us get to this point! We're almost there!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give you an update from the developer team in case you aren't following the development of Ubuntu Touch very closely. To get to it quickly, it seems like we won't be able to deliver an update to Mir 1.0 or higher in Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.

Edit: Most of the problems listed here have been resolved. See https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/10 for more details on what's blocking the merge of unity8+Mir1.1 into the normal cadence.

There's a bit to unpack for this one. The best technical explanation can be gained from others on the team, but you're going to get me for this one.

The big problems

Apps rarely display

The most glaring issue is that apps are rarely able to display anything on the screen. They start correctly and can almost always be interacted with, but only a black box is displayed. Resizing windows in desktop mode leads to many fun effects.

To paraphrase, it seems like there is a race condition in Mir getting a display surface (a box which the app uses to draw stuff) from Android before it has to pass it to the app.

This problem is mainly exhibited on devices with Qualcomm chipsets.

Poor performance

Some actions are extremely slow. When apps display correctly, they have a very low framerate. Pulling out the dock and the app launcher is painful. There really is no excuse for this, newer versions of Mir are much more efficient than our current 0.24.

Interestingly, the performance of the indicators is almost perfect. They feel way better to use than they do under Mir 0.24. In fact, the lowered input latency of Mir >0.26 is noticeable when scrolling around the indicators. This shows us that the failures are within Unity8 itself -- Mir is functioning perfectly.

We should have known

These challenges aren't entirely unexpected. The Android->Hybris->Mir->QtMir->Unity8->QtUbuntu pipeline can't be expected to be perfectly stable when several parts of that stack change all at once. We were over-optimistic when estimating how long it'd take to solve the problems upgrading Mir and Unity8 at the same time would bring.

What's next?

I'll change gears and focus on delivering some more fixes to OTA-8 before wrapping up. Marius will continue working on Mir and other intense low-level issues.

This cycle has included a lot of behind-the-scenes fixes as we've been fixing up automated tests on many components (especially the Ubuntu UI Toolkit -- Thank you Rodney!), allowing us to bring on new code. I've been merging in some rather old PRs (sorry for the wait, everyone who opened those) and I hope to continue to clear the queue for this release.

Tomorrow we'll merge the changes from our xenial_-_edge_-_mir branch into xenial_-_edge. This will cause any Qualcomm devices on the edge channel to experience the problems I listed above (and could cause general instability on other devices). It will be difficult to update Qualcomm devices without having developer mode enabled (which I hope you have anyway, you're on the edge channel). If you are using the edge channel and are not tolerant to these issues (I question how you got on edge in the first place ), please move to rc or stable using the options in System Settings.

If you're not sure whether you're using the edge channel or not, you probably are not. The current release channel is listed in "System Settings -> Updates -> Update settings, 'Channels'"

After https://github.com/ubports/unity8/issues/121 was filed and we've had not one, but many sour discussions about this or related topics, I figure we should try to slow it down a bit.

People are getting antsy (read: livid) about the changes to Ubuntu Touch in upcoming releases. In this post I'll try to tackle the issue of "home." More specifically, Where is home in Ubuntu Touch now?

The case for going home

Home, in terms of an operating environment, is the first place where a user arrives and a place they can return to. It's taken many forms over the years of personal computing:

• 7000 BYTES FREE, READY.
• $ (or C:\>)
• Windows' Start menu (Then its Start screen, then its Start menu again)
• Screens which are actually called "Home" on Android and iOS

The concept of Home is slightly different for every operating environment, but it serves a few important purposes:

• It is used to start other interactions with the environment (applications, for example)
• It is "returnable," a user should always know how to get to it. Now that operating environments are used for multitasking, this shouldn't be by destroying all running activities.
• It is "safe," a user should always know what to do once they get there

Home serves as an anchor point for the environment's experience. If the user gets lost or stuck, returning home should help.

The Dash

We can currently assert the following things about Unity8 on a mobile handset:

• Long swiping from the left of the screen always returns you to the Dash.
• The Dash is a window and is shown in the app stack.
• Due to the last point, the Dash remains focused when the device is locked and unlocked.

The dash is home.

The Drawer

The following things about those assertions have changed:

• We no longer have the Dash. Long swiping from the left of the screen opens the App Drawer.
• The Drawer is not a window and does not appear in the app switcher.
• The Drawer does not remain focused when the device is locked and unlocked.

It is consistent with our desktop experience.

But it's got everyone up in arms.

Where is home now?

By far, the most important question I see us asking ourselves (indirectly) is, "where is home now?" The answer... isn't straightforward.

Is the Background home?

Users will land in the Ubuntu Touch experience at the Background (NOT the desktop, which implies you may put things on it):

When arriving at the Background, the Launcher (some call it the dock) appears to greet them. The user may arrive at the background by booting the device or closing all their apps. By offering the Launcher, the background can be used to start other interactions AND it is safe. However, it breaks one of our main rules: There is no way to return to the background without destroying all of your activities.

Is the Drawer home?

The Drawer may be opened by long-swiping from the left of the screen or tapping on the big ol' orange button:

This can be done at any time. This makes the Drawer returnable. It is very simple, so I assert it is safe. And, well, it starts new interactions.

Something about it has people really uncomfortable, though. Maybe it's the fact that, unlike the Dash (or iOS' home, or Android's home), the Drawer is dismissed when you lock the device. This resonates with me a bit, a serial home-presser before locking my device. I like to start at square one whenever I pick up my phone.

Can we find home?

Does this add a new requirement to home? Does home also need to be durable (or comfortable?), lasting through transitions to lock states or other huge events?

Or, is this okay? Is this a case of a different design being more efficient? The ideal use of Unity8 is pinning applications to the Launcher, where they can be managed and switched between (even on the lock screen).

(Maybe the Launcher is home, or the lock screen!)

Home must be durable

If home must be durable, the Background is close to being home. The only problem is we can't return to it easily. There are an infinite number of ways to solve this, here are a couple I've thought of:

Go to background as an app

Hide apps appears as another window in the app switcher. It is always located behind the most recently used app, as shown here.

Go to background as an action

We discussed having Go to background as a specific action you perform on the app switcher. It could also go somewhere else, but there's nowhere to put it. This issue proposes having it be the "Cancel" action of the app switcher, when you tap in the blank space. That caused a lot of upset since it changes the current behavior (tapping in the blank space goes to the app you were just using, today you learned) and is not explicit (as a Python developer, I agree). Here's a way to make it explicit:

(It took me twenty minutes to make that, don't judge me)

Nah, this is more efficient

If home doesn't need to be durable to be home, maybe there is a way to offer an olive branch to people who think it does?

What do you think?

Does home need to be durable? If so, is the Background a good place to have that interaction? Is there a good way to get there?

How do we keep the home interaction consistent between phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop?

Note that "just add another setting to..." is not an acceptable compromise. More customization means more development overhead, makes it more difficult to support users (you might have to do this, or you might have to do that), and takes away from a consistent experience. (If you want to discuss this metatopic, please make another thread.)

Addendum: ground rules

You're talking about a bunch of colorful rectangles, remember. Take your time when replying and keep it respectful and on-topic. This is a good place to brainstorm, but make your ideas concrete with mockups rather than talking about them abstractly.

So, what have we learned this week?

• Everyone wants a home
• No one can agree on what home is
• Some people like the desktop "stuff on your desktop" paradigm, others hate it
• New Unity8 already provides features we're used to seeing on a home screen, but not somewhere that is a home screen

Quite a few shades of gray here. I don't think we'll be able to reach consensus for everyone without just getting in and doing something, then taking the feedback from that. It's really hard to describe dynamic functionality in words and sometimes it doesn't make sense until it's put in front of you.

Personally, I think Kugi said it best early on:

I guess I could live without "home" until we get a great idea that's really a game changer

Let's try some things out and see what sticks, starting at the simplest first. The best ideas will naturally float up and get traction behind them. As they develop past their initial stages, we'll see more development toward interfaces which are consistent at every point.

I must reiterate that (since my job title is "development manager" and I feel the need to protect the time of our paid and volunteer developers) I do not support adding lots more settings or compromising between ideas. I truly believe we can make one really good way to use a mouse, keyboard, and/or touchscreen on any size personal device and the only way we'll do that is by working together. If that is totally not to someone's liking, we are not the only mobile operating system.

So, to put what is next more concretely:

• We may experiment with Jan's idea to tap the background (it's only a few lines of code to change what tapping there does) and ask for feedback from small groups.
• Otherwise, we don't want to make any huge changes to new Unity8 before it is released to Stable the first time. We'll release then iterate.

Go out and make.

Edit: The situation is now resolved.

Hello everyone,

I regret to inform you that we made an oversight and allowed the Image Signing key for https://system-image.ubports.com expire. We are working to remedy the issue, but in the mean time downloading updates to Ubuntu Touch is not possible. You will receive a "FileNotFoundError" referencing a keyring file upon trying to update.

Only the on-device image updater is affected. Installing Ubuntu Touch using the UBports Installer is still possible. You may still update apps and use your Ubuntu Touch device normally. Since there has not been a recent stable update, most users are not highly impacted by this issue.

To ensure that this never happens again, we are implementing automatic checking of the image signing keys: https://github.com/ubports/build-scripts/pull/10

This post will be updated as new information becomes available. You may also track this issue at https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1120

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for being here, for reading this, for helping us create Ubuntu Touch, and especially for helping others when it breaks. I know that sometimes it seems like the requests for help never end or that people go off into the ether after their threads are solved... but I've watched many stick around, turn around, and help others. It's all thanks to you.

I'd like to open the floor... if you've had anyone that helped you while you were getting started, and you're still here, give them a ping to show them your thanks!

I'd personally like to thank @Flohack and NotKit (who isn't on the forum, bummer!) for greeting me back in September of 2016 and helping me create the ultimately failed Nexus 5X port. Even if my original goals weren't reached, I've had three years of fun and met so many amazing people thanks to your level-headed approach to newcomers. Also, of course I need to thank @mariogrip for the opportunity to dedicate my time to the project.

How about you?

I really had no plan for where best to express this information, so here's as good a place as any.

TL;DR: It's not ready yet.

First, some definitions to make sure we're on the same page:

• Roughly speaking, anything that is merged into a xenial branch on a Debian-style package in the https://github.com/ubports organization gets built and released to devel. This is what we mean when we say "edge merge" or anything similar.
• We expect ourselves to ship a release of Ubuntu Touch every 6-8 weeks, including 2 weeks for testing. This gives us 4-6 weeks of "open merge" time in a cycle where low to critical priority changes may be merged. During the 2-week testing period that changes to merging critical priority changes only.
• Releases of Ubuntu Touch move sequentially from devel to rc to stable. That is, Stable OTA-10 is the exact same set of bits as rc 2019-W33/2, which is the exact same set of bits as devel 2019-08-16.

This is the only way we can release software. Changes we merge into a package go into devel which must go to rc which must go to stable. We cannot easily or cleanly substitute in a certain old version of a package, for example. If we merge broken changes, our options are to revert those changes or fix them so they are not broken. That was the cause of OTA-10's delay: we merged some improperly tested changes and believed we could fix them faster than we could revert them. This proved to be false.

To make it crystal clear, if something is broken in devel, it will be broken in the upcoming stable.

I'm fairly sure that it will take more than a week to merge all of the changes from xenial_-_edge into xenial, get the packages built correctly, and get the release pipelines happy again. This takes anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of our expected cycle time, reducing the number of bugs we can expect to fix before we can release again.

I firmly believe "if you add a little to a little, you have a big pile" (attributed to Hesiod). Check out https://github.com/orgs/ubports/projects/10. It looks like a small pile of things. However, we know that, as very early adopters of the edge software, we are imperfect testers. We aren't going to catch every regression from devel to edge. That's why we release software to devel. Lots of people testing means more bugs filed and higher quality software. In this case, that would add a little more to our little pile. Suddenly it doesn't look like such a little pile of bugs any more.

We don't want to end up with that rush or crunch. It means lower-quality software for you. Our goal is to have the number of known bugs in edge to a minimal point at the start of a cycle so we can take our 1-2 weeks to merge from xenial_-_edge to xenial. Then we can fix the myriad bugs that people will find, because they're better testers than us.

If you want to help us, try out the edge channel and report anything strange you find. This might further delay the merge, but it will ensure a smooth transition and a faster release when the merge does happen.

A critical issue was found in https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1556, "Text messages do not wake the phone."

Fixing this issue, releasing the fix into devel, and testing it for inclusion to rc is our highest priority. But given the high profile nature of the issue, we will likely not feel safe in releasing an RC before Wednesday, and we will definitely not feel safe releasing to Stable until after the RC is released and tested.

For that reason, Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 is again delayed, this time at least to September 16. We may need to further delay if the issue is not fixed in time.

Sorry about that, @Mystic-X. Some new software went into edge today and appears to have broken the channel for all devices.

The devel channel is unaffected by this change, and it's what we recommend for users who want daily updates with a lower likelihood of breakage.

As @Keneda mentioned, I'd recommend using the UBports Installer to install the devel channel. Just make sure the "Wipe data" option isn't selected during the installation. You may need to manually select your device and follow its on-screen instructions.

@arubislander @kugiigi

Actually I did end up accidentally tagging an OTA-13 image for the PinePhone. So it was possible to update the PinePhone for a short time and end up with the text "OTA-13" in Settings -> About

The tag doesn't have anything to do with the version number. It's a bit of text that could be set to anything. Much like devel images are tagged YYYY-MM-DD and rc images are tagged YYYY-W## with the week number.

I just happened to make an OTA-13 tag on the PinePhone channel. If you're interested, it's image version 7. So "Version 7" would appear in Settings -> Updates and "OTA-13" would appear in Settings -> about after it was installed.

@Keneda, this message reads as mocking. I trust that you didn't mean it this way, but please consider the effect that messages like this can have on people considering Ubuntu Touch and looking in to our community.

Good news, everyone! Maintenance is complete!

There's one remaining issue that I'm watching, and it may be related to Cloudflare caching:

The text 'composer.textarea.placholder' is appearing in the post composer when it's empty. This won't affect your use of the forum.

I later found that it was not strictly required to wait that long to initiate the test. The device goes into suspend almost immediately on turning off the screen. The important questions are:

• Does the device wake up for receipt of messages?
• Does the device stay awake long enough for all user actions to complete after a message is received?

Apologies for the lack of detail in my previous message, but the reason for the delay was an embargoed fix for https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-4519-1.

I have now pushed RC image 2020-W38.

Due to the contents of the PulseAudio change, we believe we can release safely on Monday (September 21).

However, a change has been merged to ubuntu-push during our freeze period, causing a rebuild. Since the last time ubuntu-push was rebuilt was a year ago, we are cautious around this component. It is possible that a change in one of its dependencies has caused a regression in its behavior on-device. During this period, please be extra-conscious of push notification receipt from apps like TELEports and FluffyChat.

I've run a variety of tests on devices using the pushclient example app in the store, so I'm fairly certain everything is fine. But please, watch this piece in particular.

Hello everyone,

At 1800 UTC on September 18, 2020, we'll be taking the forum down for some maintenance and upgrades. This should not take more than two hours, full service should be restored by 2000 UTC.

During this time, attempts to connect to the UBports Forum may fail altogether or be met with a "Maintenance in progress, please try again later" page.

Sorry for any inconvenience, we will try to get it back online as quickly as possible!

Due to a critical issue found in the current RC, we have again delayed the release of OTA-13 to Monday, September 21.

This is precisely why we don't do 5-month update cycles...

A critical issue was found in https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/1556, "Text messages do not wake the phone."

Fixing this issue, releasing the fix into devel, and testing it for inclusion to rc is our highest priority. But given the high profile nature of the issue, we will likely not feel safe in releasing an RC before Wednesday, and we will definitely not feel safe releasing to Stable until after the RC is released and tested.

For that reason, Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 is again delayed, this time at least to September 16. We may need to further delay if the issue is not fixed in time.

Due to the need to release a new RC image and the tickets still waiting in the QA column, release has been pushed from Friday, September 4 to Wednesday, September 9.