The first Ubuntu-powered phones are expected to arrive this fall

Aug 18, 2014 09:55 GMT  ·  By

Canonical developers want to be ready before the upcoming fall launch of phones powered by Ubuntu and they have now started to work on the RTM version, more precisely to squash all the bugs.

Ubuntu-powered phones are very likely to arrive in a few months, from Bq in Europe and Meizu in China, but they need a polished and bug-free operating system. This is the reason why Canonical is starting a separate branch of Ubuntu Touch, which has been dubbed RTM (release to manufacturing).

This version will eventually become the stable Ubuntu OS that is needed for a marketable phone, but in order to get there it still needs a lot of work. In fact, if you install on a Nexus 4 phone the most stable release available, you will still experience problems, crashes, and various bugs.

It's stable enough to get the user through the day with minimal hassle, but it's not ready in any way to be implemented in phones that will go on sale. That will change with the RTM release, once the bugs and problems are corrected.

The only problem with an RTM release is the fact that new features will make their way into this branch a lot slower and the OS will soon hit a freeze stage. Everyone will be focused on bug fixing and nothing else.

“We have now switched the CI Train in preparation for RTM support. The transition took a little bit longer than we expected so we apologize for all the inconveniences. Both the backend and frontend should now be good to go,” says Łukasz Zemczak.

CI Train is a method that helps developers find problems and bugs more easily. This means that no new features get accepted until all the current problems have been solved and until a new stable image has been promoted.

For the RTM branch of Ubuntu Touch, the conditions might be even stricter. The marketable version of Ubuntu Touch will need to be extremely stable and it will have to provide most of the features and options that a client will expect from a regular phone.

Having a proper RTM release in time for the fall announced launch is imperative for Canonical, so it's very likely that we'll see a much more stable version soon on the official channel.

If you want test Ubuntu for phones, you can install it right now on a Nexus 4 or Nexus 7 device and follow the comprehensive tutorial provided by Canonical.