Hello,
the feature was removed from the default installation but you can still get them working on any Ubuntu touch device.

So here is what you need to do:

1. Install "Desktop Apps Scope" so that you can browse your legacy (X11) apps and execute them.
   https://uappexplorer.com/app/libertine-scope.ubuntu

2. Now you should connect your phone to your computer as this is easier done on desktop rather than on the device itself. However, if you set your phone terminal not to suspend itself or you will supervise it all the time it is also possible to do this on your device.
   If you are going the desktop computer way you need to enable developer mode on your device (so have some kind of a pin or password set on your phone - it should tell you when enabling the developer mode). Then you need to execute "phablet-shell" or "adb shell" (without the quotes) on your PC.
   If you are doing this directly on your device, just open the terminal app (must be installed).

3. Either way you are now in your Ubuntu device shell. So execute this in order to create an Ubuntu container to hold your apps: libertine-container-manager create --id ubuntu --name 'ubuntu'
   Change the name and ID if you'd like.
   This is a lengthy process and will take some time on the device (about 10 minutes).

4. Now you have the container set up. In order to maintain it you can execute something like this:
   libertine-container-manager exec --command "/bin/bash" --id ubuntu
   Once executed you'll have the superuser shell of the inside container and you can do "apt install firefox" or whatever you want, just like on the desktop.
   You can also install apps like this: "libertine-container-manager install-package -p firefox -i ubuntu"

Once app or apps are installed just go to the scope installed in the first step (you must enable it by swiping from the bottom edge on the main screen). If it was already enabled refreshing the view may be necessary.

For more info about what you can do with the Ubuntu container see "libertine-container-manager --help".

Some of you may find these demos usable:
https://gitlab.com/zub2/SDLDemo
https://gitlab.com/zub2/MirGLESDemo

However with the Mir upgrade things should become a bit easier as regular Wayland-compiled SDL stuff should start working there. That is if I understand it correctly.

Hi,
since Anbox is finally here and usable more than ever before, who wouldn't want to play with it.

Unfortunately only the most powered devices were selected for this right now - leaving MX4 behind. But thanks to Marius arale is now in too :).

So, either build it on your own or download a boot image for arale here:
https://gitlab.com/zubozrout/kernel_arale (kernel patched with anbox stuff)
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-canonical.img
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-ubports-old.img
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-ubports-latest.img (I'd recommend this one as it has the latest initrd.img)

Then continue by installing the above images just as mentioned here:
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1676/development-testers-for-anbox

If the image is flashed and your system booted up you should be able to check anbox binder is available eg. like this:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ file /dev/anbox-binder
/dev/anbox-binder: character special (511/0)

Installing Anbox may become a bit tricky since we have little space to operate with - so remount your / partition rw as mentioned in the original post, update and upgrade via apt, create some folder in your home, called e.g. "anbox" and do this:
apt -o Dir::Cache::Archives=/home/phablet/anbox install anbox-ubuntu-touch

Now we are almost there. You can now delete that new folder in home with all its content.

However in order for the last step: anbox-tool install to work you'll need to do this:

sudo nano /usr/bin/anbox-tool

and edit this line (it is one of the first lines of code, bellow the license comment):
DEVICES_URL = "https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/devices.json" (not leaving anything after it - on this line)

No we have swapped the json file which it checks against with our own containing arale in the list.

Now just do the mentioned anbox-tool install - it will take a while. And you are good to go :).

Enjoy

PS. Thank you very much Marius for your precious time and very valuable help with this :).

(

@flohack You are of course right, but it is not just that. Look at the other side of the coin - Microsoft hurt Linux a lot in the past. Among well known examples I could even share a local example: In 2000 Microsoft almost destroyed a computer selling company named Mironet because they preferred Linux. They had their computers confiscated for almost 2 years based on Microsoft telling police they have illegal software on their PCs - which turned out not to be true. Before this all happened they were the biggest computer selling company in the Czech republic and because of this other company (Alza) took their place instead (czech source). And not much has changed now with things like this.

In any case I don't intend to spam here. Just wanted to say I don't trust Microsoft - but maybe they are better now than in the past. And I understand that GitHub had issues and had to act. Regarding myself I wasn't sure whether I should move my own projects over to GitLab or stay until I read this thread's first post. But it is of course much easier to move a few projects of mine not relying on anything than such a complex infrastructure UBports has. And therefore I agree with you the move should note be based solely on the fact Microsoft has taken over the service as it works well for the project now and would require quite a lot of resources to proceed with the move.

Who knows what Microsoft plans for GitHub. But it surely will no longer be what it used to be as so many people moved away in the last day or so. And I must say I miss the nice, simple and straightforward interface on GitLab.

@joe Well there are still apps you can't install from the Open Store like Extremetuxracer or Neverball/Neverputt. Someone should upload those to the Open Store and then it can go away :). Anyway, I believe that removing the icon would not hurt - people would still be able to enable the store scope and swipe to it if enabled.

@jezek Well, you would need to find the partition table of you phone to find the correct partition to flash the image to.

Not sure what would happen if the boot logo image was incorrect, it would work nonetheless (with a black screen) or perhaps it would brick the phone and you would have to reflash the correct image using fastboot then ... something like fastboot flash logo splash.img (the command may not work at all or could be different depending on the device).

And if you flash it to a wrong partition there is a great chance of bricking the phone.

@Stefano Hm, this doesn't make sense then. If it works with Android sending to manufacturer is certainly not an option here. If that's the case then it would mean the EFS doesn't get destroyed but rather Ubuntu Touch has issues reading it.

@UniSuperBox Would there be a way for users to debug this somehow? It would be great if this thing could be solved as it seems to be recurring quite often in the forums/on github.

Hi,
you can always Google man pages for specific things when on the go, even narrow it down by distro and its version when searching.

But it doesn't make much sense to have them installed on phones. It would just occupy precious space while being very rarely useful - especially when there are other sources available.

Ok, so there is this ppa https://launchpad.net/~bhdouglass/+archive/ubuntu/clickable with the latest forked package that is even available for bionic :). And it has xenial app support. With that reviewing the packages should work correctly.

Hello,
I've been trying to migrate an app previously created for vivid over to xenial and it seems to be bumping into the following issue:
** (process:5611): WARNING **: Unable to start app 'transport.zubozrout_Transport_1.1': Invalid app ID: transport.zubozrout_Transport_1.1

That is everything builds fine, the predecessor of this app even works fine, but for some reason I can't launch this app. If I build it with 15.04 it launches fine on xenial but doesn't work as it should afterwards.

So my question is, how is the app ID string generated so that I can change it to a valid string. And what is the issue? Is it the uppercase T, numbers or the dot?

(I am using clickable on 18.04 tu build my old Ubuntu SDK project)

Appreciate all your help.

@taiga-woods I am sorry I can't say much to the rest, but as for Dekko. The issue you are likely experiencing is that Google disabled simple logins with just a username & password. But you can still make the emails work if you create an app password as suggested here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/7874/can-t-create-gmail-account-in-dekko/6

As for the USB cable, that's indeed weird. I know that I need to unlock my phone (enter the pin code) in order for the device to be accessible from my laptop. But since it worked before but doesn't work now for you it may be a regressions for Nexus 5 though I guess it is unlikely. Hopefully someone else with the same device can confirm it works.

As for slowness & energy consumption. That is weird, no idea why. Maybe Dekko trying to access Gmail much too often since it is not working? But probably not. No idea, I am not seeing any changes on my end - with a different device. But I do restart the phone at least once a day when applying devel updates so no services have too much time to heat up on my phone.

@phiibuntu I've seen that before too (on joyeuse). Seems like this is quite common sadly:
https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/314
https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/issues/2201
Makes me wonder why is that the case

@Lakotaubp I doubt unavailable update would be the case if it was offered in the first place :), but yes, that was already discussed above.

@emphrath Or you can just try this: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en
(works for me, but it is indeed not a good thing users have to do that)

@luksus This looks great. But I've noticed that when I run sudo waydroid upgrade it will overwrite any changes so one may need to insert it to "/var/lib/waydroid/lxc/waydroid/config_nodes" every time an update is executed.

@keneda I haven't had much luck with these despite having them installed. Either because I was doing something wrong or because I picked the wrong apps to try with. Fortunately I don't need these for the few apps that I have to use.
https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status

@dpitti That is completely unrelated to this thread and also affects all Waydroid installations no matter the device. Nonetheless, you can install F-Droid and/or Aurora Store, which is going to allow you to install most of the apps from the Android store. Of course with missing Google Play services it won't enable you to run everything, but I've been able to get e.g. some banking apps I need running this way.

@stemy I feel like I was experiencing something similar on my Redmi Note 9 Pro today with devel - I've seen the rmnet_xxx: link is not ready - and I had L if I opened up the network indicator, but no L was in the panel itself. I haven't thought of trying to switch to <= 3G, however I've also been in a area with poor signal for a while where I had 3G in the network indicator area (if opened) but the indicator in the panel itself was still empty. And when there is no 2G/3G/L right in the panel then no data flows (as "link is not ready").

Nonetheless, it might be just some current devel glitch in my case (I hope) as it works just fine on rc and stable.

@ra It is broken on stable, but should work on rc and devel. You can either wait for the next OTA or you can switch channels if you need Pure Maps.

@mrt10001 Works fine as long as you can use the installer. If you check that github thread you'll notice in my case (and likely in case of Note 9s) it only works when you have Android on a phone, but it is broken once UT is actually installed.

And the root cause of installer being broken seems to be this: https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/issues/2147

@j-mackay93 Same here on Redmi Note 9 Pro + devel: https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/issues/2201#issuecomment-1034141539

Looks like something has gone wrong, so I reverted to stable with quite some pain to achieve that - and in the end I nonetheless ended up doing a full clean reinstall.