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.
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
@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.
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.
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. 
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.
@NeoTheThird said in Pointer for those debugging web apps:
@lduboeuf said in Pointer for those debugging web apps:
write an up to date turorial for ubports community then
That would be very much appreciated! Feel free to post something on wiki.ubports.com
Have a look at:
https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Web-Browser-app-debugging
and wordsmith it if you can think of nice changes. Thanks!
(BTW, not clear how to link it into the rest of the document hierarchy.)
@libremax said in Making Ubuntu Touch an easy choice:
The development of UT has to be embedded in a long time, several decades in the same way that GNU/Linux software emerged in the 70s and 90s and only became known to tens of millions of users in the 2000s.
No reason to be impatient only to show consistency and determination.
Well, I don't think Linus was doing his thing in the 70's, but otherwise I agree with your sentiment.
Many kept waiting for the thing or decision or Big Business which would make Linux win. But it really just kept being there, attracting enthusiasm and moving forward. It was just suddenly obvious and inevitable.
So I think the project is doing all the right things. Catch up with a shared SW base. Fix the abandoned browser. Over time adopt a new flagship and, yes, set some old supported devices aside (I'm already a little worried about the flawed binary blobs in my Nexus 5). Keep chipping away at what's missing, what's broken--software and docs. If you keep at it, odds are you'll run across things which will make UT stand out. Especially since the big players can make game changing mistakes (I'm watching Google's tensions with the EU and their increasing control of Google Apps with interest).
@UKPhil said in What controls the LEDs?:
If I am reading this correctly, does that mean that the ago old issue of the notification led not working for things like Deko and such like may be resolved soon?
There are two things going on here. One is that the basic push notification service is going away, due to Ubuntu's phasing out of Touch as one of their projects. That's the one I'm working on. I have notifications working well (timely, efficient in both OTA data and battery), but it is an extra task to figure out which apps using old API's might be accomodated.
And then there's the simple issue that it appears the /sys/fs LED files were too protected, so that existing code which knew how to light up LED's couldn't. I understand that will be fixed soon.
FWIW, I used pypi.org/project/notify2/ which uses the dbus, worked for my own notification app.
@vandys Maybe with the crazy dude in office now its 25%.
Nah, I told him I'm rich, so no tax and I can deduct the price.
@Flohack FYI, probably just got attacked at the local Cafe. Turned on BT for my external keyboard, but keyboard typing was locked up, then an authentication dialog box popped up. I shut the device down ASAP, will do a clean install since God knows what got scribbled.
No BT in public for me until this is fixed!
@jezek Thanks! There it is in application-legacy-morph-browser-.log
BTW, will the PinePhone support USB OTG? I'd sometimes like a hard-attached USB keyboard....
Ok, dug through the source to obports-installer, looks like most of the goodies hang off of:
https://system-image.ubports.com
In particular:
https://system-image.ubports.com/ubports-touch/16.04/devel/hammerhead/index.json
which tells you where to get bits for various versions. The latest, currently 72, says that there's bits at :
/pool/device-e34756d822387fa9371568fa42292f8baf76d79ec7f2cee0f5c002b909dc08f5.delta-device-cc610cfc131187e182588a0f9c7c5c23ba769679708a4ba08b16878f4e93c101.tar.xz
which, once you pull it and "xzcat device-e3* | tar -xvf -" will give you boot, recovery, and system img files. I booted just to the bootloader and fastboot flash'ed those partitions, and my phone still boots OK. So I guess I'm at least sorta on the right track....
@advocatux, and indeed, no lack of gratitude here for the epic task of catching up with Xenial! Once that one browser glitch goes away, I'm up for trying it as a daily driver.