The new OTA update will offer exciting new features

Aug 5, 2016 20:50 GMT  ·  By

A new OTA (Over the Air) update of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system is in development for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices. We're talking about the OTA-13, which should land in the first week of September 2016.

In the last few days, the Ubuntu Touch developers have managed to land a lot of exciting new features to the rc-proposed channels of the upcoming OTA-13 software update, which the most adventurous Ubuntu Phone and Tablet users can already test-drive on their supported devices.

Among these, we can mention Unity 8 indicator-keyboard support, more Ubuntu theme with brand new icons for keyboard indicators, along with various new monochrome arrow icons, better support for Wi-Fi networks with long passwords, and an updated Libertine Scope that will be renamed "Desktop Apps" shortly.

"We finally landed the big unity8 indicator-keyboard support silo (consisting of multiple packages, such as unity8, qtubuntu, unity-api, indicator-keyboard and more). That being said we still need to land one more silo with a follow-up design change before the new indicator can be added to the touch seeds - hopefully at max tomorrow for the Feature Freeze," says Łukasz Zemczak in his latest landing announcement.

Android 6.0 BSP, bug fixes

Other exciting new features coming in the Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 update are the move to the Android 6.0 BSP (Board Support Packages), which means that more devices will be able to support the Ubuntu mobile OS, and fixes for some of the most annoying issues, such as various memory leaks, OSK/button flickering, and more.

A new big release of the Mir display server will also be implemented in Ubuntu Touch OTA-13, and it appears that the development team is currently experimenting with backporting the Go 1.6 programming language to the Vivid (Ubuntu 15.04) overlay. Of course, many of the default apps and Scopes will get improvements too.

The Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 update was initially scheduled to land on September 1, 2016, but because the developers behind Canonical's mobile operating system want to add even more cool new features, it has just gotten delayed for a week, so the final release should now hit the stable channels on September 7.