All users will get the OTA-8.5 update by tomorrow

Dec 16, 2015 23:11 GMT  ·  By

A few minutes ago, December 16, Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us about what's going on in the Ubuntu Touch world regarding the OTA software update.

We've already reported earlier that the OTA-8.5 hotfix was officially released, and it landed safely on users' Ubuntu Phone devices, though some will have to wait a few more hours to get it. The big picture is that, by tomorrow, all Ubuntu Phone users will get the OTA-8.5 update, which brought fixes for some nasty bugs, but also one new feature.

"OTA-8.5 phased update is in progress! We're almost half way there, so tomorrow all users should have the update on their phones. It was mostly a bugfix release - besides one feature, the background playlist handling in media-hub, which we included as part of one of our fixes," said Łukasz Zemczak, Ubuntu Foundations.

Next stop OTA-9

Now that the OTA-8.5 story is almost over, the Ubuntu Touch developers can concentrate their efforts on implementing more interesting new features for the upcoming major OTA update, the OTA-9, which is expected early in 2016, on January 20. Therefore, today was a good day for landing some more cool things to it, such as a new ubuntu-push, as well as updated ubuntu-keyboard and qtdeclarative components.

Additionally, the UITK (UI Toolkit) has been updated with header slot management, convergence changes, and memory leak fixes, the Address Book app has received support for choosing default address books and keyboard navigation, buteo has been updated as well, along with the ubuntu-themes package. Furthermore, the qml-module-qtbluetooth package has been properly added to the touch seeds.

Therefore, as you can see, things are looking very good for next year's OTA update for Ubuntu Phones, especially that the Ubuntu Touch developers have already prepared a new version of the next-generation Mir display server, another update to the UI Toolkit, as well as a few more goodies. Tomorrow we will have more details, so make sure that you follow us on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.