News and Update
AppLee, Marius and Alfred presented.
Marius appeared from outdoors broadcasting from his UT phone.
UBports was present at an event in the Netherlands recently and gave a talk. Hopefully the recording will be online soon. Thanks to Moem for helping to organise.
New improvements
Lomiri document editor can accept ODT and docx documents. Calendar app has seen a raft of improvements. There have been changes to the way that Waydroid fetches images from upstream for Android 13.
In the experiments which Alfred has been running on encryption, he found that the Android layer was trying to take charge of the encryption process, despite the fact that we have a module of our own to deal with that. He has been working on a method to prevent that takeover. Until the issue was fixed, there is a conflict between running Waydroid and running encryption.
Meanwhile, there are a few more devices on which encryption can be made to work.
Marius has finished creating a UI for managing his eSIM. It is still very basic. All you can do is add or remove.
There is an issue with VoLTE dropping out after awhile and Marius is trying to sort that out as well.OpenStore apps
JSONedit is a new app which does what it says. Thanks to Mathias for providing that. The user interface is very professional.
There is now a web app for accessing the SNS bank in Netherlands.
OpenStore app itself has been updated.
Bitcoin lightning wallet has seen some changes.
Michael has added some translations to Mileage app.
UBpower indicator has been refreshed again.
UT translator is a great app which works off-line.
Sponsors were thanked.Questions
The News section of our Forum is the best place to post questions for the Q&A. YouTube live chat, Telegram and Matrix are other places to post a question.
If you didn't know, the Forum questions get priority.
Browser updatesDomubpkm asked whether a revised browser based on Qt6 would be available only for Noble or might it be in Focal too? AppLee’s understanding is that the essential elements from Qt6 will be bundled with the browser. That combine package will be available for Focal and Noble. After that, we hope to bring Noble up-to-date by incorporating Qt6 into the system. We will then be able to provide Morph on its own but in a newer version.
Developing for Ubuntu Touch
Ida has been trying to improve their programming skills and has been looking for some help with developing for UT. Where would be a good place to start with that? The old documentation on ContentHub is still very relevant and important for developers to know. docs.ubports.com is the place to look.
What is Lomiri?
Alagirialagiri asked for an explanation of what Lomiri is. Lomiri is the graphical shell which we provide for convergence. It is shared across mobile and desktop and displays a UI appropriate to where it is. All of the elements of Lomiri are maintained by the UBports Foundation. It was inherited from Unity 7/8, developed by Canonical.
Encryption on Focal
They also asked whether encryption will be only for Noble or perhaps for Focal too? It is for Noble only and as suggested it could provide some of the security that banking apps need. Of course it would mean having a bank that was interested and that is a more difficult thing.
Pixel 3a on Noble
Captainfunk asked about the support for Pixel 3a in Noble. It was made clear last time but although that phone has been one of the best options in the past it is now showing its age and this is not practical to update it. VoLTE will not happen on that device. They probably will be a Noble release but it will have some limitations. Alfred has been working on encryption for it.
They also asked whether the upgrade from Focal to noble will wipe out all personal data. The answer is no. Data and settings will be retained.
Captainfunk also asked whether the device information on the website is up-to-date. Depending on which device it might be updated more or less frequently. A lot depends on the maintainer. Some are very good at updating their pages and some fall behind with that task. Devices which have very few users obviously see very few updates.
Hardware partners
J&J asked whether UBports has any conversations with hardware partners. Yes, we talk often with Volla and with Fairphone. Volla already ships UT preloaded and we want to do the same with Fairphone in the future.
Our partnership with Brax is already known about and we hope there will be some developments from that.
Marketing team
Someone asked whether we have a marketing team. Yes, we do but like all of our operation, it relies on volunteers. Of course we always welcome more people helping out.See you next time :-)