14 DAY TRIAL // The Ubuntu team is busy working on the OTA-8 update for mobile devices, and they are also preparing the terrain for an eventual rebase on the new Xenial Xerus.
With the feature freeze now in effect, for the most part, the Ubuntu developers can focus more on fixing bugs and other problems. In fact, there are bound to be quite a few issues to fix since the team added a couple of big updates for Mir and Unity 8. The displayer server and the desktop environment are big components, and they have the potential to delay a release.
In any case, the developers must now also keep in mind that the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) cycle has started, so they must also take into consideration the fact that they probably have to migrate to the new platform sooner or later. If we remember correctly, the current Ubuntu Touch is still using the Vivid Vervet base, and the makers of the OS made a choice early on not to switch to Wily Werewolf.
OTA-8 will be an interesting release
We’ve already covered some of the things that will land with the next Ubuntu Touch update, so there won't be too many surprises, but we'll have to wait a little bit longer for some readable release notes.
"We have also re-enabled nightly devel-proposed builds (xenial). Remember that currently this channel now is mostly only important for core phone developers, as it allows them to make sure that everything that lands in rc-proposed also works on the latest development release. We want to make it clear once again that it's really not recommended to use devel-proposed on your phones as the vivid-based RC channels are our main focus for the time being," noted Canonical's Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak.
The new OTA-8 update is scheduled to arrive in about two weeks if nothing goes terribly wrong.