14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical continues to make improvements to Ubuntu Touch, and a new OTA (over the air) update is in the works. If everything goes well, it should be here in the next couple of weeks.
The Ubuntu developers are trying to keep a six-week cadence for the release of new updates for the mobile operating system, but it's a difficult task. They tried to make a new OTA update available every four weeks, but they were consistently late, and they had all sort of problems. Now they are giving themselves two weeks more, and they will try to keep that date.
In order to achieve this goal, they must deal with all the problems and bugs that are already piling up, especially now that they chose to move their distro to GCC 5.x. To do this, they must enter feature freeze and concentrate only on the problems. With two weeks of bug fixing, we can only hope that users will be able to get the latest without any delays whatsoever.
Ubuntu Touch enters features freeze
The fact that developers are now concentrating on bug fixes means that we won't see any kind of major features added anytime soon. In any case, all OTA updates for Ubuntu Touch brought really interesting stuff, and there is no reason to believe that this time it's going to be any different.
"The week of the OTA-6 feature and translation freezes has started! We know that multiple projects have issues with landing their changes because of the gcc-5 issues, so we expect not all of the criticals to land in time - we'll try to be considerate here. We also decided that we will not be preparing a hotfix release before OTA-6. The official update is planned to arrive in 2 weeks, so it makes no sense to occupy QA resources before that - let's use those for milestone preparation targeted next week," noted Canonica's Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak in his regular email.
The changes that will land in OTA-6 haven't been made public yet, at least not in a readable form, but details should land pretty soon.