UBports Is Working On Ubuntu Touch OTA-10

The UBports community developers continuing to advance Ubuntu Touch have shared their latest work items and plans. OTA-10 is being developed while they are also working on ports for the PinePhone and Librem 5 smart-phones, among other items on their radar.

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 55 was posted on Tuesday. The highlights come down to:

- Mir is causing various problems (or rather, apps not functioning properly with Mir) and at least for now their plan is to "kill the apps" that are not working out. A major refactoring of Qt Mir and Unity 8 is still needed.

- Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 is being worked on as their next over-the-air update. OTA-10 will bring better GPS support by means of dropping assistance functions in order to improve its reliability.

- Bringing up Ubuntu Touch on the PINE64 / Pine Phone is ongoing.

- As for whether UBports Ubuntu Touch will ever transition from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 18.04 base, it's still not decided. In particular, the transition there causes the move from Upstart to systemd and that conflicts with older devices. They say now they might just jump directly from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04 when the time comes considering how close that next LTS release is and the similar work involved.

- UBports developers finally received two developer kits recently. But there is no news to share at this time and they are prioritizing PINE64 work over the Librem 5 at least for now.

More details over on UBports.com.