Much appreciated for taking the time to read our monthly update.

With this monthly update we like to inform you about our current programming progress and experiences of this month. Also we like to inform you about the steps we experienced and you probably will experience while developing your first app.

As a team, existing of Terence, Sander, Leandro and Felix we have been making some nice progress. First of all, our team got strengthened by Koen. He is a technical writer who converts our ideas & discoveries into a fun to read online training.

We are proud to present the first four modules. If you have any feedback, feel free to let us know. You can open an issue in the course’s repository if you have a GitLab account, or send an email to koen@ubports.com.

An important step is choosing a good phone with Ubuntu Touch installed on it. The Volla Phone and the Volla Phone X have the option to get Ubuntu Touch pre-installed. With this solution you can start immediately.

On other phones you can install Ubuntu Touch with the UBports Installer. Some well-supported phones are the Google Pixel 3a, FairPhone 2, Nexus 5, and BQ phones. Take note that support for some phones will be dropped after Ubuntu Touch has migrated to the Ubuntu 20.04 base.

We like to warn that some phones can be difficult to get up and running with Ubuntu Touch. Even for experts it might take hours. So please consider and consult carefully whether the phone is worth the energy to convert to Ubuntu Touch. Just a personal thought.

Of course you will get a lot of support, if you need any, on the UBports Welcome and Install Telegram group.

Once you’ve got your phone up and running with Ubuntu Touch, it’s time for the next step. In the first module of our course we focus on how to get your development environment up and running. This is pretty straightforward if you have a Linux computer.

Follow the steps of installing Clickable, and get yourself a good IDE (integrated development environment) or code editor like Visual Studio Code. Then you are good to go.

If you use either an Apple or a Windows computer, you need to execute some extra steps.

In case of a Mac, be aware that it has two different setups. The Intel variants can be used quite easily by installing VMWare Fusion Player, which allows you to install an Ubuntu distribution. The M1 processor variants are still quite challenging to get your development environment up and running.

For Windows users, we must admit that we are quite enthusiastic about the combination of WSL2 with Docker.

You will read all about the details of setting up your phone and development environment in the first module of the training.

Once you have your environment up and running, creating your first app is as easy as the following commands:

clickable create

cd appname

clickable desktop

code .

And now you are all set to enjoy the world of developing Ubuntu Touch apps. A world in which we like to help, contact, inspire and get inspired by you.

Once a month Terence, Sander, Leandro, Felix and Koen have a public development session. Anybody interested in developing is more than welcome to come by. Even if you only want to curiously watch and observe. Walk in any moment, even if it is one minute at the end ;-)

The next public development session is scheduled on Thursday April 7th from 19:00 till 21:30 CEST on Discord.

From next month we will move to Wednesday, so the public meeting will be on Wednesday May 11th from 19:00 till 21:30 CEST.

This month we hope to have shared with you our installing procedure in a nutshell. Our next TET update will be more about how to start showing things in your app and much more.

Love to see you next time.

Kind regards,

T.E. Team