A lot of fixes and improvements have been implemented

Oct 19, 2015 12:00 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has announced that the latest OTA-7 update for Ubuntu Touch has been released, and users should start receiving the notifications. It's a phase system, and not everyone will be prompted at once to upgrade.

The Ubuntu team switched to a six-week development cycle for the OTA update, and it looks like it was a very good decision. This latest update arrived on time and without too much drama, which is always a good thing. There have been some delays in the past, but it looks like things have worked out very well for the current release.

As usual, the updates are being phased out to the users, which means that they are going to land over the course of one day. Two important things are thus achieved. The stress on the servers is considerably reduced, and if something were to happen, and a problem is found with the update, not everyone will be affected. The developers have more than enough time to stop the upload process if they have to.

OTA-7 is here for all phones

Unlike the previous OTA update, which arrived at different times for different phones, the new one is available for everyone. It looks like the testing departments have done their work in time, and no more delays occurred.

Here are some of the more prominent changes and improvements: search functionality has been added to the webbrowser history view, the context menu has been improved, the webbrowser received some HTTP basic auth support, SVG files are now recognized by the Gallery application, Scopes likes and retweets have been added, AMR codec support has been implemented, and the webbrowser is now running in an apparmor container.

Quite a few bugs have been squashed in this update, including various memory leaks, the QML cache has been fixed (better app startup times), less memory is now used by default in the browser, the crash report uploads are no longer enabled by default on stable images, and a few other security fixes have been implemented as well.

If you have an Ubuntu Phone, you might just as well start to mash that update button into the ground.