@theprivacydad Hi!
First, it is strongly recommended not to install apps via apt. More technical users could explain this better, but my understanding is that it's because of the immutable root file system. Installing via the Open Store, Libertine, or Snaps are the recommended ways.

Not sure why the keyboard pops up when long-clicking to paste, but maybe cause some people are used to using copy/paste from the swipe-up menu at the bottom of the keyboard? I do love that menu for text selection.

Browsers are of course one of the main pain points right now. Morph is slated to get a major update to Qt6, but this may not happen for some months.
In addition to uWolf, there's also uFirefox, which isn't in the Openstore, but can be installed via a click package. This seems to be the most recent: https://gitlab.com/debclick/uFirefox/-/jobs/11063789436/artifacts/file/build/aarch64-linux-gnu/app/firefox.fuseteam_142_arm64.click
Download the .click file, and open with Openstore.
Not being IN the Openstore means it's not reviewed by the Openstore.. all I can say is that my impression is Fuseteam has been around UBports a long time and seems to be a trusted member of the community.
Not sure if one can make webapps from non-Morph browsers or not.

The full system access warning that you see for uWolf in the Openstore is by comparison to most apps being confined - sandboxed by default. This is a major feature of Ubuntu Touch, almost all apps are, and need permissions to access things from other apps, via ContentHub. Privacy-wise, it's a huge asset. I'm sure it makes things like KeePass harder to implement though.

My two cents, as a non-technical user who's been using UT as his sole phone since 2020, is that the longer you use it the easier it gets. There's definitely a learning curve, and sometimes it's just a question of finding other ways to do a thing that doesn't work the way you'd hoped. Some things are lacking and imperfect, but I've always found it incredible not just that there was a true Linux OS for phones that's so usable, but that it's so pleasant to use.
To my mind, as data collection grows and grows, (and as authoritarianism rises worldwide) the need for smartphone alternatives starts to seem kinda dire. AOSP-based ROMs are good until Google decides not to share anymore, which it kinda sounds like they're already starting to do.

Thanks for checking out and writing about UT! Whatever your review, good to get the word out.
Hope it winds up being a good, useable OS for you!

I know this is an old thread, but it seemed the most relevant place to report:

Today I received a cell broadcast! Emergency alert test in Ontario, Canada. Running 20.04 OTA-6 on a Oneplus 5T.
Phone was on silent, so I just heard the vibrations and saw the message.

Way to go team! Many thanks to Lionel and others who've worked on this!

Big thank yous @Moem for showing your work on this and @danfro for getting an up to date Cinny app for us all. Really, really appreciated!

A bunch of work has gone into browsers, but nothing's working perfectly for now.
For me, Morph is still doing the job for the most part. I allow it to keep tabs open from session to session, and put passwords in when I need to.
uFirefox has filled the gap for some websites that didn't work, although now there's uWolf, a fork of Librewolf, that I hear is making a lot of progress.
My understanding is that the idea is to package whatever Qt 6 components are needed with Morph in 24.04, and then we'll have a much more up to date browser. And ideally a Firefox based browser like uWolf too. There was even impressive work on a Webkit based browser, Mimi.

As for email, mine happens to work fine in Morph. I haven't used Dekko in a while. Maybe the dev has stepped back or been busy and nobody stepped up to take theIr place? I didn't realize it had so many issues, but the answer to why there isn't (x) in UT is because you and I didn't do it.
But I appreciate that you know this, and maybe others will have solutions/workarounds to specific Dekko 2 issues.

Overall, a tonne of work and resources have been going into the upgrade to 24.04 and some other major improvements, like VoLTE, and encryption. Big, big accomplishments.
After 24.04 lands/stabilizes, perhaps somebody will have time for Dekko.

Welcome back! Hope you find solutions that work for you!

@Futura Thanks for the thoughts, and the tact with which you handle UT's shortcomings for your situation.

I'm surprised by your SMS experience. I've never heard of this delay before. I use SMS and MMS and it's more or less instantaneous.
It may be the case that on some devices, VoLTE is causing issues with SMS/MMS? And I heard that it's not working yet in 24.04. But both VoLTE and 24.04 that are in beta, and are being worked on.

As a fellow North American, I share your desire for RCS. It's not that I'm in love with the format - personally I hope the EU succeeds in making messenger apps interoperable the way email is. The problem is that that people here send RCS/MMS with the absolute expectation that it will be received, because it's free with every plan. Major problem here when it doesn't work.
My impression is that few if any of the core developers of UT are North American, and in most places in the world, RCS/MMS is hardly used, and definitely not taken as a given for anybody with a smartphone the way that it is here.
This said, group messages aside, MMS works pretty well for most people! Photos between myself and those using iOS and Android phones default to MMS and go through fine. I've always had the odd quirk, and sometimes would miss messages without seeing any notification, but I found a carrier where I always do at least get a message that an MMS couldn't be downloaded.
Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers to get RCS. UBports is driven by volunteers, devs are expensive, and the work is time consuming. There have been a tonne of big things to solve lately, and that are being solved / have been solved! From a global perspective many things are just bigger priorities than RCS.
Often we North Americans can tend to think that the world revolves around us, and it really, really doesn't. In a UT context, we need to learn to fix our problems ourselves and not expect volunteers to want to solve problems that don't apply to them or those around them when there are bigger fish to fry.
So I guess you and I can learn to be wizards at coding, find local devs willing to take this on, or raise a large enough bounty to make it worth somebody's time. Bounties seem not to be impossible, but I think it takes a lot to make it truly worthwhile.
Meanwhile, you could play with APN settings, borrow a SIM or take a cheap plan to try different carriers, and see if you can get SMS and MMS working normally, and support the UT project in any way you can.

Flatpaks sounds great, but again, it takes somebody doing it.
Without any interest in wading into a Flatpak vs Snaps debate, I'll mention that we do already have Snaps. To my mind, effort might be better spent getting more apps from Snaps working in a UT setting. Most Linux apps aren't exactly made for mobile, and whether we have Flatpak or Snaps, it's not going to mean that everything just works.
Meanwhile, some of us get by ok without using Waydroid at all, and with more up to date browser coming along, it'll get even easier to use more websites rather than apps.

One thing that us non-devs CAN do is communicate about the current state of affairs. I've always liked the Forum for this - easily searched and read by anyone. I feel that the website Devices page does a fairly good job too, and the Q&As are great!
But we can all brainstorm the best way to communicate things, pitch our ideas, and make it happen. https://ubports.com/community-center

Hope you're already able to solve the issues you're having and are able to use UT successfully and happily!

Clarification for future readers of this post that might be considering Ubuntu Touch in Canada: All 3 major Canadian networks have stated that they're maintaining 3G until December 2025. Different story in the USA, where at different points in 2022, the major networks discontinued 3G.

In Canada, Ubuntu Touch is very much usable as a phone. Telephone calls, SMS, MMS photos, audio, and video all work as expected for me. (Group texts do not, and MMS has caused me plenty of headaches in general, though I think I've got a stable setup now.)

Hopefully VOLTE can work soon. I'm much too inept to be of use in that quest other than to keep donating to UBports and crossing my fingers. My enduring gratitude to those working to make UT better. It's already improved considerably since I started using it in late 2020.

Cool! Thanks for the demos, nice to see your progress! This is going to be very useful.
Thanks so much for all your work!

@atarilinux I'll start by saying that VoLTE, while being used daily by some, sounds like it should still be considered in beta across all devices.

You're right that Volla and Fairphone don't sell outside the EU, at least for now. @AppLee recently mentioned that Volla is looking into official network support in North America, so who knows, maybe they'll sell phones here one day.
Meanwhile, there is Murena, a third party vendor, that will sell Fairphones to NA, or third party shipping services, which I know little about, but will ship here for a markup.
There are also Fairphone 4 phones on eBay from a vendor called NeverMSRP that I considered for a bit. They seem to have good reviews.

But there are also people using Xiaomi phones with VoLTE, including in USA I believe. Poco X3, Redmi Note 9 Pro, and maybe others. The ports for these phones seem to be solid and supported. I found those phones hard to find domestically, but careful searches on eBay yielded international vendors who'd sell to Canada, though tariff stuff may be complicated in USA.

And then Brax3 phone and Furiphone FLX1 are both making ports of UT, though we're awaiting details. Both play well with USA networks though.

Hard time to make a decision, with VoLTE and 24.04 still in progress, but we can at least help each other be aware of the options and make the most informed decision possible.

Pure Maps, " Slim and " Unconfined are all available in the OpenStore as viewed from 20.04 again.
Thanks Jonatan!

@RJDan This topic is for testing 20.04 OTA 10. Sounds like you've upgraded to 24.04. There's a separate topic for 24.04.

I think apps not opening makes sense. Not all will work out of box on 24.04, and will require action by the app developer.
If you've gone to 24.04 without intending to, maybe wait for somebody more knowledgeable than me to suggest how to go back. I thiiink you should just be able to flash 20.04 Stable / RC without erasing data and that should be fine? But I'm not sure.

@aimar Yes, GMT + 8, and notably, that linked site confirms that it indeed resets at midnight in China, not some other time of day. Useful!

There's an excellent post to help install on Redmi Note 9 Pro and similar devices. While of course there will be differences for yours, like firmware, I strongly suspect the basics of unlocking will be the same.
The other difference is that the post is from 2024, and it seems clear that Xiaomi has made it harder to unlock. But at least this shows you the process:

https://forums.ubports.com/post/79264

@aimar Yeah, I'd read something about that. It resets at a certain time of day, China time (one big time zone).. not sure if it's midnight or what. Worth looking into what time the daily quota resets.

@aimar Thanks for the tip, and for posting that link! I'll try it out. Meanwhile my existing phone, Oneplus N10 got VoLTE support, and my need for a different phone evaporated.
But I'd love to get UT working on that device.

Good luck getting yours unlocked! Seems it may be more a question of luck than anything else

@aimar It should just be a one week (168 hour, they'll say) wait.

I can't confirm what @kln_nurv said exactly, but it does kinda fit with my experience.

I bought a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro from the EU for delivery in Canada. I made a Xiaomi account, synced it to the phone, waited 168 days, but where it failed was as part of something Xiaomi called SIM sync or something similar. There was supposed to be a verification SMS from Xiaomi. This would never be received, and SIM Sync / SIM Activation would fail.

Then when I'd try Mi Unlock Tool even after 7 days, it would say the phone isn't "Activated".
A few emails with Xiaomi and a couple calls with my cellular carrier later, I gave up.

The best they could come up with at the time is that "short-code SMS", the type commonly used for 2FA, wasn't coming through maybe because either Xiaomi didn't have servers in Canada, or because it wasn't in its original market. They said short-code SMS don't work internationally. None of this made very much sense to me.

So I dunno, it's possible it now only works from within China.
I still have the phone. I will try to find time to make a new Xiaomi account via a Proton VPN server in Hong Kong and see if that works.. best I can do.

Any recent reports from others unlocking Xiaomi devices could be helpful. This was in 2026 that I was trying. Clearly people succeeded at this in the past. But anybody done so this year?

@gpatel-fr So far it seems that reliably I will get a ring when calling somebody from the same network as me. From Lucky Mobile, in Canada, it rings when I call someone using Lucky Mobile or Virgin Mobile, both of which are MVNOs on the Bell Network.
I don't think I'm hearing any rings when not doing that. Calling 1-800 numbers yielded mixed results, but consistently it would ring or not ring for a given number.

@gpatel-fr Yep, will definitely look out for network-related rings.

@gpatel-fr Your technical knowledge is greater than mine - I wouldn't know how to set up traces or look for sources of the issue without guidance. But if there are specific ways I can help test things out, let me know

@gandalf I can say that the first three items on your list do not occur for me on a Oneplus N10. I just tested to make sure. There are some times when it does seem to maybe get stuck reverting to 3G for calls (I now see an H in top indicator, for HSPA I guess) but WiFi doesn't trigger it for me.

@gpatel-fr I have also experienced the odd ring when dialing out since my OP N10 got VoLTE, but mostly not.
I thought maybe it was only occurring when I was connected over 3G, but no, after dialing some random 1-800 numbers it happens the same for a given number whether I'm on VoLTE or 3G/H.

I don't really see lack of ring as much of an issue (I'm still just amazed and grateful to have VoLTE!) but it's still worth trying to figure out when it does/doesn't happen. I'll start looking for whether its network dependent.

@tacofeast Yes, welcome!
It takes some considerable work to get Ubuntu Touch working on a given phone. There are no ports of Samsung phones at present, and porting is done by community members like yourself.
So to see UT running on those phones, you'd need to do the work, or find others interested in sharing that work. There's documentation on porting on the UBports website.

Alternately, there'd a list of already supported devices, and perhaps you could find one available used to test out the OS.

Has anybody had luck getting an unlock token from Oneplus for a BE2028 that was sold by a third party over amazon?
...
has anybody tried "adjusting" an invoice slightly?