14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu for phones has been deemed stable for quite some time, but the developers from Canonical still have a long way to go until all the pieces are put into place, and that includes the addition of all the necessary applications, like an email client.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has been pushing Ubuntu towards the idea of convergence for a while now, and it's starting to take shape. There aren't any truly convergent applications out there, but some of them are bound to appear.
When people hear about convergence they mostly imagine Unity working similarly on Ubuntu for phones and desktop, but that's only a small part of the project. Sure, getting the desktop and Ubuntu for phones to share the code base is important, but Canonical needs to have much more than this.
One of the most requested features and applications on Ubuntu for phone is the email client. No smartphone is released nowadays without one, and just getting a simple HTML webapp that points toward your Gmail or Yahoo email doesn't really count. Ubuntu developers don't usually settle with half measures. That's why they are making their own email client that will be able to run and act the same on every Ubuntu, no matter the platform.
Ubuntu developer Michael Hall has explained that the first steps towards a converged email client for Ubuntu have been taken already. Canonical didn't build the app from scratch, but it used the code base for Trojitá, an already established client with a long history.
“We’re not starting from scratch though, we’re building on top of the incredible work done in the Trojitá project. Trojitá provides a fast, light email client built with Qt, which made it ideal for using with Ubuntu. And yesterday, the first of that work was accepted into upstream, you can now build an Ubuntu Components front end to Trojitá,” said Michael Hall on his blog.
The work for the new email client is still in its early stages and the Ubuntu developers need all the help they can get. They will try to use the amazing work of Andrea Del Sarto, who provided a few UI mockups for the potential application, and which were amazing.
There is no time frame for the introduction of the email app on Ubuntu for phones and certainly there is no indication when it could also arrive on the desktops, but the Ubuntu universe is very close to a major transformation that will definitely set it apart from other Linux distros.