UBports Q&A 185 on 7 March 2026.
Alfred and AppLee presented.
Alfred began by explaining that his video stream was being broadcast from his Fairphone 5, using Morph browser. This is down to integration of Qt6.
There is an Install Fest in the Czech Republic on 28/29 March in Prague.
In Lomiri, the active application will be highlighted and the inactive applications will be dulled out.
Qt and Qtwebengine have their scaling properly rounded up.
There is a segfault fix for the keyboard.
We have made some improvements to the updates server. Arrangements are in place to expand the rootfs.
There is a fix to MediaScanner, which should prevent crashes down to permission errors.
Again in Lomiri, placeholders and windows have been linked more neatly, so that windows click to the placeholder neatly.
Qt6 browser now implements the ‘on touch’ protocol from Qt6 in the webengine. That tidies up cut and paste.
AppLee announced that Volla has introduced a new UT compatible device - the Plinius. It is designed as a rugged phone for use on construction sites and similar. It is available in two
variants.
Alfred showed the Xperia X running Lomiri with Mir2. The display is handled by Mir1 but the shell is handled by Mir2. Aethercast and screen recording require Mir1 so those functions still work even though there is Mir2 in the mix. This is very resource intensive and requires that we have an expanded rootfs.
On his Fairphone, Alfred showed a window which is rendered using libhybris Vulcan, utilising Wayland. Vulcan is an evolution of openGL. It allows a low level, efficient graphics API. It should be possible to extend this so that desktop openGL works directly on the phone.
OpenStore apps
Some business users of Volla are already moving desktop Linux applications onto their phones, to achieve a more integrated approach. Building on that, we should be able to implement Steam gaming platform. GL4ES is yet another option.
Solboki has created an app for reading the French newspaper Le Monde. A subscription is required for full use. The app was built by Claude AI and has only been tested on Fairphone.
AppLee has made an app to help you catalogue your watch collection.
WRMaster from Samuel creates QR codes from strings.
Samuel has also created a chat portal which uses Gmail.
ProjectMoon has made a tool for accessing a thing called Geminispace, which is apparently not related to Google’s Gemini?
TouchPiano is by Pierre and is a QML6 web app.
Cookbook by Jonas is for use with your recipe directory on Nextcloud.
Many apps have been updated. Many thanks to all the active maintainers.
A special mention to Calendar app, which is now working very nicely.
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.
26.04 upgradeStanwood asked whether we will migrate next to the 26.04 repository or skip over that and go to 28.04? Marius has been doing some building against the 26.04 CI but that is not based on any final decision. Even going to 26.04 means a shake-up in systems, needing kernel changes. Something like 5.10 or 5.14 will be needed. For reference, the Fairphone 5 uses 5.4 kernel. We are pretty happy with 24.04 at the moment so there is no rush.
Brax3 device
On the Brax3 device there is no big news at the moment, but the bounty funded approach is now in the test phase. It is at the developer stage but hopefully soon it will be thrown open to the community as an alpha release. it is worth waiting for them because if they release it too early, it will break your device.
Screen keyboard with snaps
There was a question about the on screen keyboard with snaps. At the moment, only snaps which ship mallit components and have them enabled will work. We hope that by using Mir2 more, alongside Wayland, we will be able to fix this. The big problem with Mir2 is trust prompts - permission dialogues.
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.
Random topics
Alfred is working with SeaLion, which is a Classic app that behaves very much like a Debian app. It should be useful for experimentation.
Alfred uses Nano. AppLee uses Vim because he can SSH.
Someone asked about Titan2 but it is a community port in progress and we don’t know what stage it has reached.
Alfred has not a abandoned the Pixel 3A completely. Once we have sorted out the rootfs expansion it will be worth going back to that. Someone has expressed a wish to work on VoLTE for that device.
See you next time :-)