14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is preparing for the official release of Ubuntu Touch and the company is working to build an RTM version of its mobile operating system. To do that successfully, the devs also need to work on the apps, not only on the OS, so they have announced a new “Core Apps Hack Days” next week.
The first Ubuntu phones should arrive this fall and the developers still have a lot of work to do. Canonical decided a while back that Ubuntu for phones (or Ubuntu Touch) would be split in two branches, one that will be actively worked on and another that will be deemed RTM (release to manufacturing).
The RTM branch is supposed to be extremely stable and all the effort is being concentrated for this purpose alone. It won't be as advanced as the current build, but it will be sufficient for the first waves of phones from Meizu and Bq.
“We’re running another set of Core Apps Hack Days next week. Starting Monday 30th June through to Friday 4th July we’ll be hacking on Core Apps, getting them polished for our upcoming RTM (Release To Manufacture) images. The goal of our hack days is as always to implement missing features, fix bugs, get new developers involved in coding on Ubuntu using the SDK and to have some fun hacking on Free Software.”
“For those who’ve not seen the hack days before, it’s really simple. We get together from 09:00 UTC till 21:00 UTC on #ubuntu-app-devel on freenode IRC and hack on the Core Apps. We will be testing the apps to destruction, filing and triaging bugs, creating patches, discussing and testing proposals and generally do whatever we can to get these apps ready for RTM,” said Ubuntu developers on the official blog.
This is not the first event of its kind organized by Canonical, and the previous Core Apps Hack Days was very successful. The developers managed to fix a lot of issues and bugs, so it stands to reason that they are willing to do it again.
The difference between events is that 3rd party community app developers have been invited as well to this one. This concentrated effort can also help Ubuntu Touch expand its application library. Canonical has to make sure that Ubuntu Touch has as many apps available as possible at launch, and that will only be possible if it extends a helping hand to other devs as well.
For now, you can run Ubuntu Touch on Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices, but after the operating system launches on other devices, it's likely that the community will start porting Ubuntu on other phones as well.