News and Update
AppLee, Alfred and Marius presented.
Predictions for 2024
They began with some very sketchy predictions about what the New Year holds for Ubports.
Alfred put the focus on his side projects and showcased some Webassembly stuff that he has put together on his iPad. It needs a Snapcraft clone for the device you want to run on it, then you just run snaps. He shared a screencast of a touch friendly development environment. It can generate C++ builds, Webassemblies and libraries. Flatpak could be added, in principle. Debugging can be done in situ. It even has Titan integration. It is said that SigLang will work with Webassembly, so that is a whole other area for experimentation.
SIP calling would offer a fully open source telephony option and that is a very big deal. There are lots of developments showing up on Gitlab about this.
AppLee suggested that we can make some good progress with Android 3. We are just at the start of Snaps but they will be a game changer, especially for convergence. GIMP and Qcreator are now very much in play.
Marius mentioned 24.04 which will come in soon and should present few problems. VoLTE and SIP will play a big role this year. Getting Lomiri to work fully on desktop with no issues is attainable but whether that will be this year or next we don’t know. Our ultra goal is to outclass both iOS and Android!
The whole community is invited to say what they hope will happen this year but also what they think will not happen.
Alfred said there is no chance that Clicks will be replaced this year. Applee said that the rootfs becoming RW will not happen this year!
MyName wants UT phones to be on sale in their local Tesco (UK, Irish, Hungary supermarket). Installing is ‘easy’ but still an obstacle to ‘Normals’. Of course we do have direct sales, with Volla. Pine no longer sells with UT installed but their devices are made for Linux so the installation is very easy.
News
In news, Cosmia is trying to port Lomiri to NixOS. There have been some additions to Teleports from Florian and Dan. LionelD has been doing work on import/export. Rachanan is in the process of upgrading qtwebengine. Some security updates have been put in place. Mohammad is working on a dark mode switch for the System. He is also adding a configurable charging information alert to the lockscreen. Rather than just % it will be able to say ‘3 hours 40 minutes until charged’.
LionelD is working on notifications which are shown but blurred out for privacy.
So what were the highlights for us in 2023?
Alfred commented on the obvious big one – the switch to Focal. AppLee welcomed the early work by Alfred on Snaps, the main benefit of which will come this year.
Marius checked out Gitlab to see how many issues we merged in 2023. Bits of our software didn’t reach Gitlab until half way into the year, so there is a big underestimate. Nevertheless there were 5766 pull requests. We should multiply that by around 5 to get the total number of commits.
To remind people, all the core packages (other than Halium) are now integrated with Debian, so we at last have sync with the upstream. We are no longer running to catch up. We will still add, upgrade and sometimes downgrade but those are the only times when we will need to make manual changes.
What did the community appreciate most about 2023
Johndoe asked what are the next big changes for UT? What problems are the team facing? Changing over to 24.04 and making progress with VoLTE are the big things for 2024. Talking about the team itself, the challenge is that there are so few of us. We have said it many times before but we need more hands for the work.
It relates to the question from Kimo about the lack of applications adapted to work with Focal. There too the issue is having enough individuals ready to do the work involved. Once we have built up a decent number of Snaps or Flatpaks we will not have the same upgrade issues as they are capable of standing alone. For developers building apps from new now, the situation is actually much more convenient because our system is now up with the mainstream rather than being an outdated variant. Snaps allow us to sidestep the block caused by the fact that we have not yet implemented Qt 6.0. The same applies to our current version of qtwebengine.
Implementing support for other browsers is certainly within reach. That is another area where we would very much like some support.
From a live comment, a huge shout-out to the Waydroid developers and the improvements which they put in place last year.
Ivan did some great work porting miatoll device and at the same time came up with a fix generally for a performance drop when switching between apps.
Sponsors were thanked. We are truly grateful for every donation and making a donation is very easy to do. Select one of our options.
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.
Android apps
Hermit asked whether we have something to allow Android apps to run? Well yes, Waydroid is that thing :)
Acknowledgement
domubpkm asked for all the developers to be thanked. To name just one, Daniel has made some improvements to the Text Editor. That matters a lot because office apps don’t feature strongly in UT.
In future Q&As we should bring back app shout-outs.
CUPS support
uxes asked are we going to get CUPS printer support? One of Alfred’s side experiments is to look at a Snap version of CUPS. It works if you set a path for it in System settings. That can be set in one line. Alfred hasn’t done any serious testing with it yet. There are some remnants of code in System settings. Maybe we can upgrade that and provide integration?
GTK apps and Flutter
XiJinPingPong asked whether GTK app development for UT will be possible in the future? In Snap form the answer is more or less yes already.
Marius has been looking at Flutter. That is a very nice mechanism for cross platform development and it would be very nice to integrate it with UT to enable app development
VoLTE and SIP
Mark Petersen commented that VoLTE seems to be so specific to devices and carriers that instead of spending a lot of effort cracking those nuts, we should concentrate on implementing a smooth and fully functional SIP calling system.
Alfred has done some hacking with his phone so that SIP integrates with the Dialer. Marius added that since VoLTE relies to some extent on SIP protocols, maybe SIP in software is our way forward on VoLTE development? Another issue is whether we can arrange on board re-routing of a SIP number to a SIM number?
Debugging workshop
Andrisk asked whether we would consider holding a workshop on debugging system level components of UT? That is something we could look at. We would have to think about what sort of format would be appropriate. It would be good to record it as a permanent learning resource. As always, more and better documentation is needed! It wouldn’t work as a theory thing. We need to look at a practical challenge and then analyse the steps to sorting it out.
Support for new devices
Hermit asked about support for new devices, especially the Samsung Galaxy S10+. The UT porting group is the place to get assistance with porting but it is important to understand that there is no central ‘Ubports porting team’ that *does* ports. We assist individuals who do it independently
Mobile data issues
Messayisto asked about mobile data. There are multiple issues in data management. Marius has fixed one problem he found and that fix is now in devel. When you switch cell towers (that isn’t just when you move, it is also when you drop down to 2G towers or 2G frequency to make a call) that starts a race condition in network-manager. It doesn’t happen every time, so debugging is a bit of a nightmare. Marius has to get in his car to find the right place to reproduce it :) Somebody may be able to help by providing logs if they live in a place where the race condition always triggers.
Ionic apps
There was a question about making Ionic apps work in UT. Marius understood that as a framework for mobile, for making webapps. It is apparently not very specific but also it is not clear what benefit it would bring. In iOS and Android it will have some native integrations. You won’t get that functionality with UT.
Generic Kernel Interface
Luigi311 asked whether with new phones being gki, will porting become simpler once UT supports gki? [Generic Kernel Interface]. That is our great hope, yes. Gki2 is looking more stable than the first try. Nikita has been looking at it. Watch this space.
See you next time :-)