News and Update
AppLee and Alfred presented.
Lomiri and Mir news
There has been some work on window management in Lomiri, especially on overlays. Top bar hiding and display has been improved and syncmonitor has had some work. Some updates towards Noble and Debian sharing have been attended to.
Alfred has been tweaking Mir and QtMir. We are on Mir 1.8 (even to begin with on Noble). We need to get to Mir 2.x. Wayland subsurface support would mean that each app would have its own distinct window. This is what allows for window overlaps. While we are waiting, Alfred has been working on a patch for Mir 1.8, to give it that functionality. This will have the effect of improving Waydroid support.
Apps news
The Iquit app has been updated.There is a mobile banking application for ING BE, the Belgian arm of the bank. It is a webapp. Our thank to Lucstay11 for that.
Matthias Dahlmanns has made an Image Composer app. It is a ‘desktop publishing’ tool for adding images to a leaflet or booklet, making a design by placing, overlapping and rotating the images before exporting them as an image file. It would be great for creating memes!
LionelD has continued with his regular updates of URL Dispatcher.
There is a new app out for testing. It is designed to handle Odoo timesheets. It is at an early stage and the direction and shape will follow feedback from the first users. It is being developed by Synconics Technologies, friends of UBports.
Another new app is Browser Leak, again by Lucstay11. His app is designed to show up any fingerprinting of your phone. The app will show up any weaknesses but of course use a good quality VPN to protect yourself.
Sturm Reader has been updated. This was one of the first and best apps on UT and it allows you to read ePub books, comics, PDF files etc. We thank Emanuele Sorce for his work.
Wegvejs app only works in the Netherlands and is able to report travel conditions on the roads and point out where to find petrol/diesel retailers, as well as car charging points. Congratulations to Sander.
Jozef has done some more work on Amazfish, an app which talks to a variety of smartwatches, including those capable of running Asteroid OS.
The Radio Nova app for France has been given some more tweaks by gwado.
UTttesla has been updated to catch up with API changes at the Tesla end. Richard is still at a very early stage in creating this app so any Tesla drivers with a UT phone are asked to help him by trying it.
Sponsors were thanked. We are truly grateful for every donation and making a donation is very easy to do. Select one of our options.
We have a much larger number of Patreons than those whose names are read out. There are around a hundred in total but we highlight those who pay a relatively large sum each month.
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.
A reminder that it is okay also to donate to specific projects within Ubports.
Foundation and phones for developers
Wally asked about foundation money going to phones for developers who cannot be expected to buy lots of different devices for testing etc. They asked whether it might be appropriate for them to act as a channel for supporters to donate phones to potential developers. Fairphone 4 was an example where some were provided to enable porting of UT. It isn’t so clear that giving old devices would be useful for that. Developing applications for UT is a different matter and testing could take place on any supported device. There is a practical with customs and the cost of sending devices. It happens informally already when convenient.Clicker list of questions:
First, how many developers are involved in work on the base OS, that is excluding core app developers. In terms of involvement there is a fluctuating number of main contributors around 7 to 10. Obviously that doesn’t mean ‘full time UT developers’. All volunteer time as they are able. Will you skip 22.04 and go straight to 24.04? Yes exactly, that is the plan. It will arrive fairly soon in fact.
Will the OS upgrade result in various devices being dropped? If so. Is that a hardware issue or a lack of time to work on them all? The issue would probably be kernel compatibility and at the moment we don’t know. We don’t have the resources to get very involved with kernel patching but if there is something minor we might be able to fix it. The jump will not be anything like as complicated or problematic as the jump from 16.04 so will see how it goes.
The Pixel 3A needed some CPU accounting via kernel updates and that was a manageable task.
The Devices page of the website gives some quite precise information about the status of each port. That will include an indication of whether it is actively maintained. A device may work now but if nobody currently looks after it, eventually it will fail.
With each new OS version there is more reliance on new kernels so with 26.04 we could see a major loss of older devices. The Xperia X dates from 2016, so it is amazing that it still works at all. People who can do the work usually want to spend their time on newer, more capable devices. It is easier, produces better results and their efforts will last for longer.
How vulnerable are users going to be if they are still using devices with old kernels? Obviously if users have a device which still works but has been left behind it will not have proper security protection. That doesn’t mean that using the device is very dangerous but it does mean that the security is not what we would like or expect. You will still have apparmor doing its job to protect data but it isn’t ideal for sure.
We still rely on installations and upgrades though an open bootloader. Eventually we want to have a mechanism to lock it again but that will need an entirely different way of doing those things. Our UT phones are older models so not very attractive to thieves, which is helpful!
Their last question was about sandboxing of data between apps. All sharing of data is done through ContentHub. There are unconfined apps where there is a good reason for them to be unconfined but the user is alerted before using them. AppArmor seals apps within their own bubble and prevents them from causing issues outside their own frame of reference.
Kimo list of questions
They were interested in having an energy rating app and video calling. They note that Teleports has video calling but no everyone is happy to use Telegram. Is a purely open source messenger (such as one based on XMPP) a realistic ask for UT? This is a topic we have been discussing for many years. The last big hope was that SIP would deliver that. The SIP efforts are stalled for now and whatever solution we found would have to mediate access to camera and microphone so that it is limited to only those times specifically authorised by the user. An app like that is a very complicated project and although there are various ways in which it could be done, it all comes back to the point already made, that we have limited funds and only a few developers. There is no obvious technical obstacle.
Is there a solution to providing instant notifications in applications? Yes, we do have push notifications. The difficult part is having a whole package including our own push notifications server. Creating one would stretch our resources and effort so we have not gone there. Push notifications in Teleports are possible because Telegram allows us to use their servers for that. Axolotl provides some functionality with Signal but they do not approve use of their notifications server, so Axolotl doesn’t have that feature.
Lomiri PPA for Desktop
Alagirialagiri asked about installation of the Lomiri PPA in Noble desktop. Can it be done? Yes it can but it is still in development. Certainly install it the old-fashioned way and have a look but don’t expect a finished product.Cheaper devices
Why are we not concentrating on devices that are cheap and easily available in every country in the world? Some are very locked down or localised models. The Pixel 3a used is quite affordable and fairly universal. Lineage OS is way bigger than us but they are still very limited in the number of devices they can work with. Often phones with the same name are quite different inside, for example in Chinese versus European versions. A grey import of the wrong version would be useless for running UT. Banking apps
“We need banking apps”. Well a very limited webapp was presented by us today but overall, it is banks that build banking apps and we are way to small for them to bother with. Android and Apple provide ready made protocols that app developers can just plug into and as that is easy, obviously they do it. We are not the sort of organisation that can provide sophisticated off the peg routines. Regulators ignore the existence of niches like UT. Equally, app developers don’t want to bother with older versions of Android or iOS. They insist that you get a new phone. New browser development
Alfred was asked how his browser is going? It works quite well there is a way available to improve the graphics performance and along with other developers he is trying to work out how to implement those improvements. Another issue is adapting to browser to Android drivers, as originally it was designed for iOS drivers. A Click with limited features may go up soon but it will have a lot of features missing, such as camera integration.Porting
Finally, would it make sense to try porting to a new device without any programming knowledge? If you have a lot of free time and a technical mindset it is possible. There would definitely be a big sense of achievement. There are others online who would be able to give you some advice.
See you next time :-)