14 DAY TRIAL // The work on Ubuntu Touch advances, and the team developing the project has just announced that a new testing build is ready to go live.
In other words, Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 will be released on May 6, and testers are all invited to install the new version, try it out, and then send feedback to help further polish the experience and resolve bugs.
As with every Ubuntu Touch update, there are several changes coming in OTA-12, with three very important highlights.
First, it’s the upgrade from Mir 0.24 to Mir 1.2, the developing team announces in a blog post.
Then, it’s a change that concerns the Lomiri version bundled with the OS.
“Return Lomiri (the code still says unity8) to version 8.15+17.04.20170404.7-0ubuntu2, one of the last released by Canonical, and build up from it. This introduced a number of new interaction models, including the Application Drawer,” the team explains.
Help from the entire community needed
But the biggest change is the removal of scopes, which will obviously create a new home screen for all users. “The Dash has been removed from this version of Lomiri, taking the old ‘home screen’ and scopes with it,” the announcement reads.
UBports says it needs help from the entire community to test this new version and polish the experience in a way that would make this release better than the previous updates.
“Honestly, it's difficult to give a concise list of changes between OTA-11 and OTA-12. The work on this update was started in the edge channel as early as December of 2018. Work continued in the background until October of 2019, when it was merged into our xenial branch after OTA-11. We've continued working on it in the foreground since then,” it says.
A new GitHub page has been created for Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 QA, so you’ll find more information on things that you need to test here when the new build officially goes live.