| UBports Foundation email newsletter, April 16th, 2021. Table of contentFrom your editor
Hello everybody in the Ubuntu Touch/UBports community! The last 2 weeks have been really amazing! I got a statistics report which showed that our revived newsletter had a bounce rate of only 6%. Wow! In the first edition I used "noreply" as the default from-address, but some people clicked on reply and got a bounced message of course. But I also received a ton of positive feedback and I would really like to share that with you all. So here goes: Marcus said: " Hi Jeroen, I'm glad to see you are restarting this list!" He also offered to help out with the newsletter which we of course accepted gladly. This also meant that we had to create a Telegram group for discussion and decisions within the newsletter team. So, a big welcome to Marcus for joining the newsletter team!
Martin wrote: " Hi Jeroen, thank you for that newsletter, nice to hear from you. I'm also very happy to see that the recent update of Ubuntu Touch is running much more stable on my One Plus One. Finally the camera works properly. I'm glad that this project exists and I fund it with a couple of euros per month, a little something to show my appreciation. From my point of view you're already doing a great job as marketing manager, Jeroen. Bye and warm regards from Austria,". Thank you so much Martin!
Thanks you all for all your nice feedback. As I wrote earlier, I was a little nervous about sending out a newsletter to more than 1200 people but this response really helped me to gain the courage and confidence to write another one :-). Oh, and this time we have grown to 1480+ people!
But I especially want to share with you all this email I received: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your email, although I assume it to be general and indiscriminate, but I would like to tell you about my experience with UBTouch in case it might be useful. I am 67 years old, I no longer work, I don't speak anything but Spanish and I have no computer or programming training: I am just a simple computer and laptop user who avoids Windows, Google and the like, who doesn't use WhatsApp or Facebook or Twitter, and who doesn't buy Apple. I tried installing UBTouch on a BQ Aquaris 5 HD and was determined to use it as my only phone when I was unlucky enough to have it break beyond repair. Although I later tried a second-hand Nexus 5, which also broke, I don't currently use UBTouch for two reasons: because I don't have a terminal to do it with, and because I had problems synchronizing my calendar with my Linux computer, a utility that I currently need for family care reasons (as well as the use of some, very few, applications designed for Android). I am currently using a Fairphone 3 with eOS. I use, or have used, ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, Tutanota, Disroot and the /e/ cloud. That's as far away from GAFAM as I've managed to get. I would try UBTouch again if I could find a reliable terminal and if I was confident that I could call and receive phone calls and SMS, have secure internet access, use fast messaging like Signal or Telegram, and have my contacts, calendar and notes well synchronized with my computer. I hope I have not distracted you unnecessarily, and I extend my warmest regards and thanks for your work to all the people who work for UBTouch. Gerardo Alonso" -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you so much Gerardo for your kind words and again to all the other people who wrote. Since the reply volume was manageable I was able to reply to everybody. So, here we are, at the start of our second newsletter. We have a shared etherpad where the team can work together to write a new edition, and a Telegram group for our discussions, and me for the time being as the "Editor in chief" position. I think it has a nice ring to it, don't you think? But you don't have to worry that this recent success will go to my head. I am still writing this, in the attic of my house, experiencing a lockdown due to a global pandemic. All I can say is that I wish you all will stay safe and healthy. Oh, and keep on hackin' of course! News, hot from the pressWord got out that NFC support has come into beta. This is pretty awesome of course. All we need now is somebody who would like to develop an app to use that data. I know somebody who is diabetic and uses an arm patch with NFC to measure his current blood sugar level. No doubt a small app for this would be a cool edition to our open-store.io site. Help neededIn this section we like to give some attention to specific requests for help that you may have. This time we received a request from one of the members of the board , Florian Lieber. We have had the following request from him: "As we are growing, testing Ubuntu Touch before a release is becoming more and more important. We need to find and kill off bugs before they break free into the real world and start consuming support resources. We would like to find one or two "Test Managers" who can build, maintain, develop and run a testing program across multiple devices and update channels, not only for OTA releases and the UBports installer, but also for apps. We already have the online tool Open-Cut ( https://www.open-cuts.org/) for that, but the data and test plans do need to be manually created. That leads to the question what requirements we have. So this can be an interesting task. What do we all expect from UT? If you have a background in software testing and you are interested in getting those efforts started or if you want more details, please contact florian at ubports dot com via email or @Flohack on Telegram for more details." And, this came in just minutes after our publishing deadline: And another request, also from Florian: "We are looking for a developer who resides in US and wants to help fixing CDMA carrier for Ubuntu Touch. Currently users in US cannot use Ubuntu Touch phones when they have a CDMA carrier like Verizon. Its a bit of low level hacking and tinkering, some experience with C and C++ would be good." If you want more details, please contact florian at ubports dot com via email or @Flohack on Telegram for more details. Interview with Dario CavedonQ: How did you become involved with Ubuntu Touch? A: My first contact with Ubuntu Touch was when Canonical presented its project back in 2013. I was enthusiast by the "One system that fits all devices" idea. At that time there was a version of Ubuntu for TV too! I have two devices with Ubuntu Touch (still working!) back from then, and I use my Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Touch on a daily basis. When Canonical dropped the project, I was contacted by a member of the Marketing Team, and joined the new UBports community gathered
together with the brave Marius Gripsgard.
Q: What are you doing in the UBports community?
A: I'm in the Marketing Team, where I'm taking care of our social media accounts, especially Twitter and Mastodon. I also manage the info@ubports.com email.
Q: What are your plans in the UBports community in the near future?
A: I will continue managing the social media accounts, but I'm also studying Odoo
(thanks Jeoren!) to be better at it, so I think in the next months I will start some new types of contribution. ;-)
Q: What else do you want to tell the members of our community?
A: Hi all! Thank you for your incredible work, I'm very proud to be part of it, and I hope our community will grow stronger in the next years till the world domination! :-D
Try the experimental Fairphone 3 build with Halium 10Ubuntu Touch already had experimental support for the Fairphone 3, but this used the Halium 9 abstraction layer. If your device was running Android 10, you had to downgrade it first to Android 9. Recently UBports community member Luksus has published an experimental port with an Android 10 base. The new port isn't as mature yet as the Halium 9 port. For instance, the system sounds don't work yet and mobile data isn't working either. But Halium 10 adds support for the camera and audio module on the Fairphone 3+. Phone calls, SMS messages, Wi-Fi, the cameras and vibration are all functional We're happy to see the progress Luksus made, but keep in mind that this is still experimental work. Ubuntu Touch Q&A 98Some topics that stood out in the Q&A session: Ubuntu Touch will soon have NFC support thanks to the work of Alfred Neumayer. During the Q&A session Alfred showed a Volla Phone and a Pixel 3a exchanging a text with a demo NFC app that he developed. Alfred launched a call to help with testing the NFC functionality in various scenarios. If you want to see NFC support in OTA-17 and you are a developer, please develop an Ubuntu Touch app that makes use of NFC.
The Open Source Way 2.0
So, that's it for this time. I hope you liked this second installment of our revived news letter. Please let us know if you have something to share that we can use. You can reach me at jeroen at ubports dot com. We'll be back in 2 weeks. In the mean time, next Saturday the 24th is another live recorded Q&A session. If you've got some time to spare, join in! Jeroen, Koen, Marcus, Dario and Nigel.
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