Hello, fellow ubports enthusiasts. I was away (from the forum, and from using ubports) for quite a while. Refreshed my Nexus 5, and wow! This OS is smooth, attractive, and the Morph browser is handling all of my different web sites quite handily.
I see so many articles on what doesn't work. I just thought a big picture perspective on the tremendous successes of this project was appropriate.
Thanks, team!
Ok, I got impatient and dug through the UT Tweak tool. Here's a workaround if you're comfortable in a terminal (or, in my case, adb shell):
gsettings get com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids
For me, this had a value:
['com.ubuntu.music', 'com.ubuntu.terminal']
Then I updated this value:
gsettings set com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids "['com.ubuntu.music', 'com.ubuntu.terminal', 'morph-browser']"
Voila! My browser is happily running in the background.
@PINE64 For shipping of batteries, I suggest that you fab a flashlight which uses the same battery. One switch, one LED, minimal plastic case. Then you can ship a battery within a device, national post office regs are satisfied, and the recipient can perhaps crack open the flashlight and use the battery elsewhere. 
I just updated OTA (the updater called it Version 9). I spotted in the release notes that there is now a new "selection mode". When your cursor is on some text, you long hold space. Swipe to get the cursor to the starting point, then double tap to switch to the mode where you swipe to drag out your range of selected text. Now you can tap cut/copy as usual, but with this excellent mode, you can exactly and easily pick your exact range of text.
Well done! I will be using this feature very often. And since your dragging/control of the selected range doesn't make you put your finger on top of the text you're trying to select (how dumb is that?), this solution is as easy as any I've ever used on a phone. Just remember to long hold space to activate it when you want to select text.
Glad to see this thread on call blocking! I have a number just endlessly hammering me, so number blocking would be great. But if I had to choose a SINGLE blocking mechanism, it would be to filter out calls/texts unless they're in my phone book. There's so much spam out there, and it's far too easy for them to change their calling number.
Is there any way to block a caller (better yet, an entire phone number pattern)? Either in the system or via an app?
If not, consider this a feature request... guess why I woke up at 2AM today. 
I just today finished coding up an alternative notification system; since I run my own message and notification server, I can do things like this. It uses a UDP-based protocol I cooked up, and I'll see how it holds up over a trip I'm taking for the next week. I have pop-up display, sound, and blinking LED for notifications. Reading the actual notifications is via a web interface.
Anyway, anybody who's interested:
https://github.com/vandys/webXMPP
The files udp.py and notified.py are the main parts of this work. At its core the server handles being an XMPP client as a proxy on your behalf, it also talks SMS via a VoIP provider for SMS messaging.
Andy
Update...
During my trip, I had to switch back to my old phone due to a bug in the Python3 notification2 library. _closed_callback() was using an "nid" which wasn't in the notifications_registry any more. I coded some defensive logic and logging, and will see what's going on.
But with that workaround, I have been able to daily drive my Nexus 5 for the second day now. I'm able to keep real time notifications with one 150 byte packet sent and received every 2.5 minutes. It lives fine behind NAT, and also seems fine with the transition from Wifi to mobile data and back.
Re: Caller Blocking?
So I couldn't stand it any more, and remembered an old Nokia N900 hack which sorta did the job. I have a daemon running now which watches for calls on the dbus, and hangs them up if they're in my blacklist config file:
http://sources.vsta.org:7100/webXMPP/dir?ci=tip
You want the tools/blacklist.py file in that project, if you want to check it out.
No, it's not a GUI or a package; if somebody wants to work with me to wrap this
in something prettier, I'd be happy to help.
I couldn't find any way to get word back to my carrier that they're not even worth
a shot in voicemail. But at least they can't ring my phone....
Is there any chance we could get Ubuntu Touch engineers from Canonical to attend an AMA? There's a ton of mechanism in Touch, and much of the internal design is not well documented. It'd be a great way to give the UBports effort a boost in the right direction if we could pull together a bunch of key questions and have them describe which parts in which packages make the magic happen.
@Tommy You might look at https://jmp.chat/
I got it for pure XMPP access to SMS/MMS, but later got their SIM and a data plan. They're a MVNO--T-Mobile here--and have a fork of Android Conversations to also do telephone calls (based on WebRTC, apparently).
So it might help, though of course I recognize an Android app isn't an immediate solution for UBports! But they do support SIP into telephony for your phone #.
Glad to see this thread on call blocking! I have a number just endlessly hammering me, so number blocking would be great. But if I had to choose a SINGLE blocking mechanism, it would be to filter out calls/texts unless they're in my phone book. There's so much spam out there, and it's far too easy for them to change their calling number.
Hello, fellow ubports enthusiasts. I was away (from the forum, and from using ubports) for quite a while. Refreshed my Nexus 5, and wow! This OS is smooth, attractive, and the Morph browser is handling all of my different web sites quite handily.
I see so many articles on what doesn't work. I just thought a big picture perspective on the tremendous successes of this project was appropriate.
Thanks, team!
@kugiigi And it's not specific to CRUST. Ubuntu Phone devs wanted all apps to be SIGSTOP'ed except when the screen was on and the app focused. And then background downloads, music playing, messaging, .... All sorts of exceptions cropped up.
Google's latest Android is ferociously aggressive in not running apps (even when selected for no "battery optimization"). Resulting in people not getting messages until their friends have long gone to lunch together without them.
So CRUST is just an outlying data point of what can happen when battery optimizations are pursued without a context of usability.
And thank you to the devs for responding so quickly! I'm glad this issue is on your radar screen.
I've touched on this issue over on the Pinephone forum, but there's a general OS issue which should probably get a little coverage here.
They've enabled a power management processor (termed "CRUST") which basically turns off almost all of the phone except the cell modem. The win is that they get great standby numbers, and a text can wake up the phone.
Downsides: phone calls often can't get answered due to the phone not waking up fast enough. XMPP is right off the table, as is Wifi. And you can't listen to music on your earbuds--as soon as the screen goes off, so does everything except that cell modem.
It's a real pity, as the ubports for the Pinephone is far and away the most polished OS for the device. Definitely daily driver quality. But the power management makes it impossible.
@rocket2nfinity said in Nexus 5 vs Nexus 5x:
@jjconstr regarding the boot loop, the N5 is really hard to break. Chances are it will boot with the installer. That's why we love the N5 so much around here, it's very difficult to brick. So, if it's in a boot loop, it's most likely that way because someone flashed a wrong file or borked the partitions.
The power button can eventually poop out, which gives you a boot loop. I have two N5's down, have two replacement buttons, but it's a pretty tedious repair, so haven't made the time to buckle down and attempt it.
Need to note that the 5x is famous for failing with a "boot loop". In fact, one disgruntled owner has a annual holiday livestream of his 5x endlessly bootlooping.
I'll have an N5 available as soon as I replace its power switch... very interested to try it!
@normandc Disappointingly, neither here nor on the pine64 forums have have I found an answer. Lots of views of the post, but no answers. OTG support for the PinePhone continues to be an open question...
BTW, will the PinePhone support USB OTG? I'd sometimes like a hard-attached USB keyboard....