Ubuntu Touch OTA-21 Release
Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom-respecting mobile operating system by UBports. Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-21, the very latest update to the system! OTA-21 will become available for the following supported Ubuntu Touch devices over the next week:

BQ E4.5 Ubuntu Edition
BQ E5 HD Ubuntu Edition
BQ M10 (F)HD Ubuntu Edition
BQ U Plus
Cosmo Communicator
F(x)tec Pro1
Fairphone 2
Fairphone 3
Google Pixel 2XL
Google Pixel 3a
Huawei Nexus 6P
LG Nexus 4
LG Nexus 5
Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition
Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition
Nexus 7 2013 (Wi-Fi and LTE models)
OnePlus 2
OnePlus 3 and 3T
Oneplus 5 and 5T
OnePlus 6 and 6T
OnePlus One
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (910F, 910P, 910T)
Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo+ (GT-I9301I)
Sony Xperia X
Sony Xperia X Compact
Sony Xperia X Performance
Sony Xperia XZ
Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet (LTE or Wi-fi only)
Vollaphone
Vollaphone X
Xiaomi Mi A2
Xiaomi Mi A3
Xiaomi Mi MIX 3
Xiaomi Poco F1
Xiaomi Redmi 3s/3x/3sp (land)
Xiaomi Redmi 4X
Xiaomi Redmi 7
Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 and 7 Pro
Xiaomi Redmi 9 and 9 Prime
Xiaomi Redmi Note 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro Max and 9S

The Pine64 PinePhone and PineTab are updated independently of the rest of these devices. The stable channel for the PinePhone and PineTab will not receive an update labeled "OTA-21".

What's new?

This release of Ubuntu Touch is still based on Ubuntu 16.04.


 
The storage statistics (free / occupied space) in the system settings got an overhaul, more categories are being shown, and the calculation of space occupied by the system partition layout and Ubuntu Touch core files has been made more precise.

Greeter redesign: Most notably the style of the Greeter (the thing that is shown when the screen is about to be unlocked) has improved significantly to give a more modern and slick appearance. It shows a different style depending on if PIN or password unlock has been selected. Try it out!

Preparations for Halium 10 ongoing: We made some fixes that will allow automatic installation and updating of Halium 10 devices, to not further block that road. Note that actual devices with Halium 10 will still take some time

Tamil language font was added

Halium 9 devices got magnetometer and compass plugins enabled in the sensor framework middle-ware. Unfortunately compass readings might be terribly off due to necessary pre-filtering of the sensor values, but its a step towards having compass available.

Media-Hub refactoring: After the rewrite of the media-hub service, the media-hub client library has also been rewritten using Qt classes. This allows to avoid depending on a few unmaintained libraries (though for the time being these libraries are still used in other projects, so they still end up being in our images — at least for now), and switch to a code base which is more easily maintainable by our developers; there are a few things that we have in the plans for the media-hub, like improving playback of remote media, support changing volume (from within the application) and playback speed, and finally supporting playback of multiple concurrent videos in the same application.
This last feature is going to be essential for our TELEports application. As an immediate benefit, this rewrite brought us a small saving in the on-disk and RAM footprint of qtubuntu-media, the plugin which exposes the media-hub functionality to QtMultimedia: since both the plugin and the client library are now written in Qt, a lot of glue code was removed. Thanks Alberto for that!

Known Issues 

On Pixel 3a (sargo) but maybe also on other Halium 9 devices there might appear an issue with video recording. This is due to incomplete cleanup of the gstreamer cache on startup due to a race condition. We decided to classify this as “known issue” since its not critical and can be fixed either by:

•  one or two more reboots
•  manual cleanup of the gstreamer cache by issuing rm -rf $HOME/.cache/gstreamer-1.0

Bugs and issues fixed

•  Adding a new APN entry in a Halium 9 device will now be persisted correctly

•  MMS can be retrieved also when in 2G network mode only

•  MMS that could not be downloaded will be now displayed with a red warning text and the user has the option to try to redownload them. There is a small issue with that: Make sure network connection is established before pressing the download button, as otherwise the connection might be tried forever and no real timeout to reset the UI model happens. This will be fixed in the next version

•  User metrics (the statistics info on the lock screen´s circle interior) was not showing anything in Halium 9 devices

•  Contact selection in messaging app works now correctly when sharing an item (like a contact) into it: Contacts can be added with the Plus sign, before this would eventually display the recipient´s details and not add them to the To: field.

•  Also a frequent crash in messaging app on startup has been fixed, that seems to have affected only certain devices though

•  In the clock app the clock hands would do a weird animation when setting up a timer and moving them across the 12 o´ clock position.

•  Custom message and ringtone sound selector had a layout issue where part of the screen was cropped

•  Microphone access in the Morph Browser has been fixed. This is an important prerequisite to getting calls in the browser going. Certain conferencing / communication services should already benefit from that.

•  Google account setup is now finally fixed for good!



How to get OTA-21

Existing Ubuntu Touch users 

Existing users of Ubuntu Touch on Stable channel (which is selected by default in the UBports Installer) will receive the OTA-21 upgrade by using the Updates screen of System Settings. Devices will randomly be allocated the update from today and through the next week. This spread is to give us a breathing space to stop the rollout of any bad update (should that ever become necessary), and is not to accommodate any bandwidth restrictions.

If however you would like to receive the update immediately, turn on ADB access and issue the following command over `adb shell`:

sudo system-image-cli -v -p 0 --progress dots
Your device should then download the update and install it. This process may take a while, depending on your download speed.


New Ubuntu Touch users

You will find instructions for installing Ubuntu Touch on your device at devices.ubuntu-touch.io.


"I found an issue!" 

Have you found a bug? We want to know! Quickly!

You can follow our Bug Reporting document to learn how to present the information we'll need to confirm and fix your issue. Every bit helps. The best way to improve Ubuntu Touch is to use it and then tell us about the experience.

You should always check to see whether your bug has already been reported on ubports/ubuntu-touch on Github. Browsing open bugs is worth doing, even if you have nothing to report. This ensures that you can watch for any of the open issues and help fix them by providing more information.

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