Ubuntu Touch Has Many Plans For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Besides the other UDS sessions this week that were already covered on Phoronix, many discussions took place about plans to improve Ubuntu Touch during the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS cycle. Canonical developers feel very hopeful and ambitions for their phone/tablet plans in the next six months.

Some of the sessions already covered from this past week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit that concern Ubuntu Touch include many improvements being needed to Ubuntu System Apps, a stable application API/ABI, and support for Ubuntu Touch Apps on the desktop.

For getting a feel for the overall direction of Ubuntu Touch during the 14.04 development cycle, here's some of the other sessions that happened this week about improvements hoped for before April of next year:

- Improving the app launching experience. Developers want apps faster and feel more responsive to users. There's also work involved with state-saving and better handle application crashing / resuming.

- Questions about to handle low-battery sitations during boot-up for Ubuntu.

- Location services improvements for Ubuntu Touch and trying to get closer to being on par with the features found in Android, iOS, and other mobile platforms.

- Ubuntu Touch Developer Mode still needs to be finished, including a proper user-interface for this developer mode on Ubuntu-powered devices.

- Improvements to the HTML5 SDK.

- Settings panel for Ubuntu Touch.

- How to handle user-data encryption for Ubuntu Touch. There's still a lot to be decided on that front, including which means of encryption to utilize.

- Push notifications support.