Hello again, everyone!
I'm happy to announce that it is time to ask for your help in testing Ubuntu Touch OTA-25, the last one for Xenial! This is slated for release on Friday, March 24th, 2023. Before then, we need to make sure it's ready to go!
What's new?
As explained in our last few release milestone posts, we're entering a period where change to Ubuntu Touch will slow down for a while. This shift in priorities is allowing us to get Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 built and on par with the stability of Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 16.04. Even so, there are some great improvements in this release!
• Fix race condition in XdgWatcher
• Pickers hard to see in Surudark
• Dialer-app: Favorite not possible
• Waydroid plans for 16.04 OTA-25 On-screen keyboard vibration to subtle on Volla Phones
• Emblem counters for Dialer-app and Messaging-app
• Notifications texts has no more than 2 lines
• Notification should be persistent if urgency status is set to critical
• Fix indefinitely discoverable bluebinder issue
• Upgrade QtWebEngine to 5.15.12
• Move qtbase´s Jenkinsfile and ubports.source_location to debian/
• Show series in channel selector for system-update
And a few bugs and common issues have been fixed, too.
By the way, if you'd like to help us out with Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04, you can learn more on the GitLab Epic we created for the project. This epic lists milestones and tasks that need to be completed for the project to be finished. We're developing a tool called the UBports Platform Development Kit, an integrated vm-in-a-box with handy developer tools that make it a cinch to work on our 20.04 images. It works on many Linux distributions, Intel, ARM64 and MacOS. We're also working on Windows support. We'd appreciate you trying it out and giving us a hand with documenting and developing with it.
How can I test?
We want to ensure that every release we ship is better than the previous one, so we're looking to our entire community to help us with the QA (Quality Assurance) of OTA-25.
New tracking tool: All OTA-related tracking is now done in an Atlassian Jira instance for FOSS projects! You need to follow the invite to Jira here first. Log in with or register an Atlassian account, then you will be able to enter the issue tracker. We've prepared a "Jira epic for OTA-25 QA“ which lists the issues we'd like your feedback on. Items in the state of "Backlog“ or "Selected for development“ have not yet begun. Items with state "In Progress“ or "In Review“ are being worked on by devs. They are not yet present in the OTA. All items in state "QA“ are contained in the current OTA in the RC channel and can be tested. Finally, items in state "Done“ have been tested successfully.
We're interested in hearing your feedback on everything in the QA column. We want to know:
* Which device are you using?
* Does the issue appear fixed in your testing?
* Did you notice any side effects of the change as it is listed in the issue or Pull Request?
Testing any issue should be easy. On your device do the following:
1. Update all of your apps using "System Settings -> Updates" or "My Apps" in the OpenStore app
2. Head to System Settings -> Updates -> Update Settings -> Release Channel
3. Select `rc`
4. Go back to the Updates screen to install the downloaded update
After your phone reboots, you'll be on the OTA-25 release candidate! Of course, **only** step 4 is required if you are already on the `rc` channel and this update will come through as usual.
The image which loads will be named `(2023-W11)` or newer. You can find your image version in System Settings -> About -> OS.
Now you can pick any issue in the "
QA“, and ensure that you are not able to reproduce it. If you can't reproduce the issue, the fix worked! If you can reproduce the issue (or you notice something else that isn't right), we want to know about that too. Leave a comment with your device and image version, then let us know the results of your test.
