14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few minutes ago, Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report for the day of December 11, 2015, to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch devs in preparation for the upcoming OTA software updates.
As we reported earlier this week, the Ubuntu Touch developers had just finished working on the soon-to-be-released OTA-8.5 hotfix update, which has been under testing in the last couple of days and should arrive for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices early next week, around Tuesday or Wednesday.
"Our QA team has finished testing the latest OTA-8.5 candidate with no blockers found. The image now goes into the final testing phase and should be made available to users around Tuesday/Wednesday next week. Big thanks to all developers and testers involved," said Łukasz Zemczak, Ubuntu Foundations.
Big Unity 8 update lands for OTA-9
Now that the OTA-8.5 hotfix is all wrapped up and ready to invade the Ubuntu Phone devices, the Ubuntu Touch devs have had some time today to land more awesome features for the next major software update, the OTA-9, which should arrive on January 20, 2016, if everything goes according to plan.
Therefore, Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 has received a big Unity 8 update with lots of convergence features, which includes all of its components, such as QtMir and QtUbuntu, a new click update with many improvements, a new Ubuntu UI Toolkit release that contains assorted features and bugfixes, as well as a new media-hub update.
Additionally, the Ubuntu Touch devs have managed to backport GStreamer from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) branch, on which Canonical's mobile operating system will soon be rebased. Some much-needed cleanup also took place today for Ubuntu Touch, and some missing language packs have been added.
Next week will be very important for Ubuntu Phone users, as the Ubuntu Touch developers will dedicate their precious time to asking them about which core components of the mobile operating system would require most of their attention, an idea recommended by the famous sturmflut, but we will have more details on Monday. Happy weekend!