Hello again, everyone!
I'm happy to announce that it is time to ask for your help in testing Ubuntu Touch OTA-19! This is slated for release on Friday, September 17, 2021. Before then, we need to make sure it's ready to go!
What's new?
As explained in our last few release milestone posts, we're entering a period where change to Ubuntu Touch will slow down for a while. This shift in priorities is allowing us to get Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 built and on par with the stability of Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 16.04. Even so, there are some great improvements in this release!
On the App framework side we had some minor improvements landed: 16.04.7 framework has been added. And the packages qml-module-qtwebview and libqt5webview5-dev have been added as well, allowing developers to wrap QtWebEngine. This was requested for application compatibility with other platforms that do not offer direct access to QtWebEngine.
Halium 7.1 and 5.1 devices have now access to gyroscope and magnetic field sensors. Also a rough implementation of a compass is available though its currently still very erratic. Improvements for this calculated sensors are welcome!
Note that Halium 9 and 10 devices use sensorfw instead of our legacy platform-api and therefore have already support for at least the gyroscope. For some reasons though magnetic field sensor is currently not correctly exposed. We will try to address this soon.
In the messaging app the keyboard will no longer pop up automatically, allowing a more focused way of reading incoming messages when one does not want to reply immediately.
And we fixed a lot of nasty bugs that you can help to verify, too, more on that later.
By the way, if you'd like to help us out with Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04, you can learn more on the
GitLab Epic we created for the project. This epic lists milestones and tasks that need to be completed for the project to be finished. We're developing a tool called the
UBports Platform Development Kit, an integrated vm-in-a-box with handy developer tools that make it a cinch to work on our 20.04 images. It works on many Linux distributions and Intel and ARM64 MacOS. We're also working on Windows support. We'd appreciate you trying it out and giving us a hand with documenting it and developing with it.
How can I test?
We want to ensure that every release we ship is better than the previous one, so we're looking to our entire community to help us with the QA (Quality Assurance) of OTA-19.
We've prepared a GitHub Project for OTA-19 QA
which lists the issues we'd like your feedback on. The QA column lists
issues which do not have complete test results. The Done column lists
issues which, thanks to our efforts here, are confirmed as fixed. The In
Progress column lists issues which are either not fixed or where the
fix has a severe negative side effect. The goal at the end of this is to
have every issue in the Done column.
We're interested in hearing your feedback on everything in the QA column. We want to know:
* Which device are you using?
* Does the issue appear fixed in your testing?
* Did you notice any side effects of the change as it is listed in the issue or Pull Request?
Testing any issue should be easy. On your device:
1. Update all of your apps using "System Settings -> Updates" or "My Apps" in the OpenStore app
2. Head to System Settings -> Updates -> Update Settings -> Release Channel
3. Select `rc`
4. Go back to the Updates screen to install the downloaded update
After your phone reboots, you'll be on the OTA-19 release candidate! Of course, **only** step 4 is required if you are already on the `rc` channel and this update will come through as usual.
The image which loads will be named `(2021-W36)` or newer. You can find your image version in System Settings -> About -> OS.
Now you can pick any issue in the QA column in the OTA-19 project,
and ensure that you are not able to reproduce it. If you can't
reproduce the issue, the fix worked! If you can reproduce the issue (or
you notice something else that isn't right), we want to know about that
too. Leave a comment with your device and image version, then let us
know the results of your test.
