14 DAY TRIAL // Although Canonical previously announce its Ubuntu Touch mobile platform will support a decent range of Nexus device, the company backtracked and confirmed it will only support two.
The initial list of supported devices contained both smartphones and tablets, such as the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 7 2013 and Nexus 10.
Unfortunately, Canonical's Alexander Sack has just announced his team of engineers will only focus on two device from now on, in order to be able to deliver Ubuntu Touch by the end of January 2014.
The two device chosen by Canonical are Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 2013, while the other three have been moved to EOL (end of life) status.
“Ubuntu Engineering will discontinue producing builds for the Galaxy Nexus (maguro) phone to ensure we can really focus on the Nexus 4 and emulator to polish and drive our Ubuntu Touch engineering agenda towards 14.04.”
Regarding the Nexus 5 support, Sack says his team will “continue to focus on the Nexus 4 phone platform and will not adopt the new Nexus 5 platform on short term (before 14.04 is out).”
According to him, it would be a mistake to move the focus on the latest Nexus smartphone “because the switching costs were simply too high taking our current engineering goals/agenda/needs for 14.04 into account.”
However, Canonical's official doesn't rule out completely the option of including the Nexus 5 on the list of supported devices: “of course, once we are on android 4.4, enabling the Nexus 5 should be relatively easy, so if anyone from community wants to adopt this baby, please get in touch with me or the Ubuntu Touch team.”
The move to Android 4.4 is scheduled to be finished by the end of January, but according to Sack they might complete it one week earlier or a week later, so stay tuned for more updates on the subject.