UBports Q&A 182 on 24th January 2026.
Presented by Alfred and Mike Gabriel
Qt6 Morph browser
A new Morph browser Click package based on Qt6 has landed. The old one by Marius is still there so you will have to select the new one. The new version ships with camera support and offers hardware acceleration. it unfortunately weighs in at 300 MB and we’re working hard to reduce that. we are working on getting Qt6 into the rootfs. Hopefully within months.
A couple of devices have been upgraded to Noble e.g. Xiaomi Lancelot.
Account handler issue and UBsync embedding
There was an issue when meshing with Debian. An online account handler in UT was in Qt5 but in Debian was Qt6. We didn’t realise at first and that caused a breakage. User account signing should now be fine.
We are trying to make the UBsync component part of the core. Otto has been working with the component developed by Jan. It will become Cloudsync in Lomiri, for Owncloud, Nextcloud and others.
In iOS and Windows, the cloud folder remains accessible, even if the cloud server goes down and we are looking at the possibility of similar functionality.
Qt upgrade
There is a board where developers can look for Qt upgrade opportunities and find an issue which they might like to help with. We would rather drop qmake for cmake entirely rather than doing everything twice. We are dealing with a nest of dependencies so we have tried to identify which changes are dependent on other changes. We have divided between those issues that can be worked on now and those which are blocked by dependence is not yet in place. For licensing reasons Sailfish OS is still using Qt 5.6 and we are trying to avoid making things difficult for them. That adds another layer of complication.
To begin with building all of the Qt6 components just keeps the existing things working properly. When it is done, though developers will be able to use Qt6 to provide new features.
Qt 7 base does not really exist yet so we haven’t thought about the upgrade to that. The issue for us is the jump from Qt 6.8 to Qt 6.9.
OpenStore apps
PureMaps unconfined has been updated. Jonatan has added support for latest HERE maps and there is now smartwatch sync.
Brenno has tweaked their UT native Bitwarden app. This comes with a health warning at the moment because it stores passwords into memory which is a potential security problem. Also it retrieves previous passwords not just the active one. Hopefully Brenno is open to feedback on this. Of course we don’t want to dissuade developers from building apps for UT.
Aawser has an app called UB Connect which functions as a KDE connect.
Monflo by Sakal is a financial app which claims to allow € and crypto to be swapped in an online account. It maybe requires the user to be based in the Netherlands.
TwitchViewer by Kallisto is described as a native Twitch player for UT.
There is quite a lot of work going on with NixManager, to allow a file handling interface for such as Flatpak within Lomiri.
Lots of developers (not necessarily from UT) i’ve been asking how they can develop for Lomiri. Mike, Guido and Marius spent a lot of time porting UT components into Debian, updating compliance at the same time. The results were not quite the same as the upstream from Debian to UT so a team has been working on tweaking them to make them directly compatible. It doesn’t really matter for UT but it does for Debian. It will help us to start with compatibility in the future.
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.
EncryptationLK108 thanked Alfred and asked when encryption will become available to all devices. It is up to porters whether they implement but this is a feature which is very likely to motivate them. of course it means that more than half of the device storage must be vacant so that the content can be moved across when it is encrypted.
Difference between members
Wally asked about the difference between a supportive member and a free member when volunteering. It isn’t clear what this is about may be an issue with the webpage. What we would recommend is that you get in touch via the main group on Telegram.
5G support
Alagirialagiri asked about 5G settings in Redmi and Poco phones. Does it mean they support 5G.
Unfortunately not we really should have a system that stops display of those settings influences which don’t support 5G. Of course you cannot get 5G unless that service is available locally.
Installer and Apple Silicon chip
MrT10001 reported that there have been some soft bricks when updating to Noble on some devices where the laptop has an Apple Silicon chip. Could we disable the installer on those machines until this is fixed? One way is to use Rosetta 2 to run a compatible version of the installer.
Desktop Lomiri flavour
In live chat someone asked whether there will be a Lomiri flavour of Ubuntu? Yes there will but a flavour is not accepted officially just like that. It is necessary to show a commitment over quite a long-term. Debian supports the idea. Of course it also needs someone on the Canonical side to accept the transfers. We don’t have that at the moment.
Whether we will go next to 26.04 or 28.04 we don’t know.
On whether UT should be based on Debian rather than Ubuntu, well there is already Mobian so probably not.
See you next time :-)