News

OTA-3 is out

We have officially released Ubuntu Touch OTA-3! This update brings a large number of fixes and improvements to the Ubuntu Touch platform. You can learn more about this release here.

This release was mighty bumpy for us, as Launchpad stopped supporting uploads to archives for Vivid early on. Later in the cycle, the Ubuntu archives for vivid were retired and moved to old-releases. These issues caused us to spend a lot of time changing URLs and build scripts to handle the new locations for our packages. They also further motivated us to move to 16.04 as soon as possible.

We'd like to thank everyone who made this release possible. Without our community contributors, sponsors, patrons, and liberapay supporters, none of this would be possible.

Foundation update

All of our paperwork to create the UBports Foundation has been completed and sent to the German government. The process is in their hands now.

We will support Anbox

We have now officially announced our support of Anbox for running containerized Android apps on Ubuntu Touch. The initial developer preview isn't out yet, stay tuned on our blog to learn more. You can find more information in our press release.

We can bring 16.04 to all devices

From our recent developments of Project Sudoku, we've been able to change how we will handle our policy for the Legacy phones. In our original plan to bring our platform to 16.04, we were using systemd, which requires changes to a device's kernel to use versus Upstart. With Sudoku, we are continuing to use Upstart. This means that we can bring 16.04 to all of our currently supported devices.

We have begun creating 16.04 images for all supported devices. It is currently only for use by developers and testers, many things either do not work or will be broken by coming changes.

Musings

What we learned from OTA-3

With any software release, it's important to take some time to look back on how the work was done and ask how we can improve for the future.

From this release, we learned a few things.

• Don't release during the holiday season. It means you'll do a lot of work during the holiday season.
• Don't push last-minute changes during the holiday season. It means your QA team will need to do a lot of work during the holiday season.

Past, Future

This episode included a brief and disorganized history lesson from us to you. There's a lot of content there, I think it comes across better as audio. It starts at 00:11:05.

We also made some predictions for what's going to happen in 2018. They start at 00:26:40