Dekko and uNav app could still be developed

Jul 18, 2017 02:59 GMT  ·  By

UBports announced today on Twitter that they managed to successfully run their modification of Canonical's deprecated Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the Nexus 5 smartphone.

When UBports launch their first stable Ubuntu Touch OTA update, they said that it runs on all officially supported Ubuntu Phone devices, except Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 devices, but since most of the team's members are Nexus 5 owners, it looks like they were working lately on upgrading the Nexus 5 to the Ubuntu 16.04 base.

Yes, you're reading it right, Ubuntu 16.04-based Ubuntu Touch update is coming, and it won't be long until you can install it on your devices, which now run Canonical's old Ubuntu 15.04 base. That's why UBports weren't able to release the promised OTA-2 update to the stable channels.

"We're focusing on Xenial and Halium," said UBports' Marius Gripsgard in the latest newsletter. "We'll see if we can get some more developers working on 15.04 again, but for now the project is heavily based on what developers *want* to do. We may also set up a regular release schedule for 15.04, but we want to focus more on a new, supported base."

Halium already supported on OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 3

Talking about Halium, the open source initiative for a common base for several OSes, including SailfishOS, AsteroidOS, KDE's Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, Mer, and Yunit and UBports' Ubuntu Touch port, it looks like it's already being tested on OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 3 smartphones, and it's coming soon to other Samsung, Motorola and Sony devices.

UBports has also been in contact lately with the developers of the very popular Dekko email client and uNav GPS navigation apps for Ubuntu Touch to encourage them to continue developing their applications for the community. However, the sad news is that UBports won't be able to support its Ubuntu 16.04-based Ubuntu Touch port for the Canonical official devices like Meizu MX4 and BQ Aquaris E4.5, E5, or M10.

In realted news, the Yunit project announced last week the release and availability of a repository for the Unity 8 user interface for phones and desktops that Canonical abandoned earlier this year, which was recently ported to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series. This is very good news for the UBports, as they can continue their work on rebasing Ubuntu Touch to Ubuntu 16.04.

Ubuntu Touch port by UBports
Ubuntu Touch port by UBports
 

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Ubuntu Touch port by UBports
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