Highlights of this release include initial gesture support with double-tap to wake for selected devices, improvements to fingerprint unlock by allowing more backoff time between read retries, as well as support for media buttons on headsets for most Ubuntu Phone devices.
In addition, the Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 update adds support for handling the
sms://URL scheme for properly opening the Messaging app, adds Full HD 1080p support to the Aethercast implementation, improves SMS and MMS support, and adds various performance tweaks to the Mir-Android-Platform.
I’m kind of surprised the current releases are still based on Ubuntu 16.04 – that’s quite an old release. They are working on upgrading the base to 20.04, and the switchover should happen relatively soon.
Having flashed both the latest Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch on my old Sony Xperia the former is still much smoother in operation, but this might be down to the kernel being used (3.10 vs 4.9)
Too bad that Canonical didn’t manage to make an Edge phone a reality. Ubuntu Touch is nice but there aren’t that many native apps. And if you want to run apps from F-Droid. You need to use a solution such as Anbox. And well. It’s too slow. Hopefully Musk will decide to utilize GNU/Linux for its Tesla phone. With upstream device drivers and all that. Then we can finally get what Google seemed to promise. But never really delivered. Considering Musk was tweeting about not agreeing with Apple 30% cut. Tax for using a Tesla device hopefully would be (much) lower. We’ll see. We know the current situation is bad. Google and Apple being happy with it. Hence sooner rather that latter somebody will decide to improve things. Maybe Musk.
If there is anything to be learned from Microsoft’s failures in the mobile space, it’s that one good phone (like the Nokia Lumia 1020) does not make an app ecosystem happen. App publishers aren’t going to say “oh look, there is one good phone that 1% of our audience who happen to be nerds and have money to throw away on an app-less phone will buy, so we are totes going to port our app to that weird new OS and take away a ton of developer time from other stuff that bring value to the 99% of our audience”. So no, the Edge wouldn’t have brought apps to Ubuntu Touch.
Do you know what brings apps to a newcomer OS that tries to break into a mature market? App compatibility with some already-established OS in that market, which for mobile phones is Android. If you think about it, the only cases of a new OS breaking into a mature market are Mac OS X and Steam OS 3. And guess what, Mac OS X was backwards compatible with MacOS 9 apps (an established OS) in at least two ways (blue box and carbon), and Steam OS was a miserable failure until it got win32 compatibility with Steam OS 3.
But you see, providing that compatibility requires work from the side of the OS vendor, while whining at developers for not supporting your OS is free. So, it naturally follows that corporations like Canonical that don’t have a real plan to make real money from their client OSes opt for the second option.
Well. There was just one good phone, iPhone. Hence you can succeed or fail with just one good phone. Microsoft mostly failed due to Linux and Java being better suited for such devices and tasks. Compared to Microsoft offering. As for the “nerds”. Musk actually is a “geek” or a “nerd”. Hence if Musk would say i am for free and open source software. He would actually know what he said and the meaning behind it. As for the Valve. Indeed Newell is sort of a geek too. On top of that he is into GNU/Linux. Tesla phone could hence have day one great gaming support. If there would be some sort of cooperation and synergies involved. And in the end don’t forget. It’s nerds and geeks that made iPhone and Android happen. And the future belongs to nerds too. That is for whatever comes after what we have now. It’s nerds and geeks that will make that happen.
It was something more than one good phone though, it created an entirely new category of mobile device (the finger-driven smartphone, compared to the stylus-driven smartphone or the keypad-driven smartphone that we had until then) with an entirely new user experience. The Ubuntu Edge was neither. Neither were Microsoft’s Lumia devices.
Also, back then, smartphone apps weren’t a thing for most people. Most people were rocking feature phones with zero third-party apps beyond Java midlet games. Even among people owning Nokia N-series smartphones, most of them didn’t load any apps on them, they just used them as advanced feature phones. So there was no dependence on some existing app ecosystem for most people.
Still. Android (phones) had no troubles in succeeding. Not offering anything revolutionary in compared to iPhone. Anyway. As Tesla phones will likely be running on Linux. Lets hope they will be closer to Ubuntu Touch and an Edge phone. Then to lets say iPhone or current Android based phones. Maybe parties such as Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS should reach out to Musk. For us to finally get an Edge alike offering. Starlink enabled and beyond. Hopefully upstream drivers and an opt-in option for root access. We’ll see. As more restrictions, less drivers … that likely never would work anyway. Compared to the Android. Whatever comes next will hence need to offer more. Not less. And games from Valve on launch.
That was because Android came to the scene when the market for finger-driven phones was still nascent and also had the Verizons and Sprints pushing those Motorola Droids and HTC EVOs as if their life depended on it, because it was, keep in mind that the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive back then. But still, most of it was due to the fact Android happened when the market was still nascent. Once the app ecosystems are built for a given category of devices, publishers won’t waste that precious developer time to port to 1%er OSes when that precious developer time could be spent adding features and fixing bugs that concern the 99% of users.
Also, Tesla phone? Even Elon Musk has hinted he’d rather not make his own phone.
@kurkosdr
So what you are basically saying is iPhone and Android will last forever. So don’t even bother to do anything about that. Well. We’ll see about that. And note that you use a nerd phone ATM. Both iPhone and Android was made by nerds. From 0%.
Nope. Read my comment again. What I said is that any new OS has to provide compatibility with at least one of those established OSes to break out of the 1%. Android is the easiest compatibility target since most of it is open source.
But they are not necessarily bought by nerds. And yes they started from 0%, because they came into a nascent (“greenfield”) market.
@kurkosdr
In my opinion compatibility with Android apps is not a necessity. The whole point of something like Ubuntu Touch or Ubuntu Edge is/was “native” apps. That is something closer to what you would normally do on desktop. And just like with Facebook both iPhone and Android are now becoming gadgets for geezers. New generations will make the switch for the switch itself. A “TikTok” of phones will become popular among youth. You’ll see. Our job (nerds and geeks) is to slipstream in a GNU/Linux with upstream drivers and opt-in option for root access. And as you say youth won’t care much about that. And that is OK.
And that’s the reason it will stay an 1%er OS. Most people here underestimate how apps are necessary to participate in modern society. Go and tell some young person to buy a phone that doesn’t have apps such as Citymapper, Uber, Deliveroo, Instagram, TikTok, Strava etc And that’s before you take into account the games. I am a young person and I wouldn’t buy such a phone, not as a daily driver anyway. Only as an experiment to throw money at.
Also, it’s not an either-or proposition. They could give them Android compatibility to gain market share and slowly push devs to native, like OS X did by slowly moving devs from Blue box and Carbon to Cocoa. But an OS needs to have the market share first to convince devs to make the switch, hence the need for compatibility.
Eventually, it boils down to money. Canonical simply doesn’t have the resources to pull off something like this. If you like Ubuntu Touch, fine, but let’s not pretend here that Ubuntu Touch has any potential of mainstream success.
@kurkosdr
Yes, exactly. As a young person you say you simply don’t care. This is a rather common thing today. And one must take that into consideration. That is on why i said it’s in the end a job for nerds and geeks to make such decisions for you. Just like they did with iPhone and Android. Long story short Ubuntu Touch alone hence will struggle. Collaborating with lets say Musk and Newell. That would already be a more realistic option. We’ll see. As things are bound to happen. And GNU/Linux is currently in a rather good position. Regardless if youth does or doesn’t care.
And you don’t understand that accomplishing that is not exactly easy. So, it all boils down to resources. The reason Steam OS is what it is right now is because Valve is pouring a ton of resources (money) into it and its win32/win64 compatibility layers. And they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because they want to protect their Steam cash cow from Microsoft’s app store (which can evolve into a real threat to Steam if Microsoft pulls their heads out of their collective posteriors and make sure that Microsoft’s app store stops being the mismanaged wasteland it is now).
Which brings the question? What is the plan to monetize Ubuntu Touch? I am talking real money, not peanuts. As I’ve said above, it all boils down to resources.
Also, Valve has no interest in mobile because that’s not where the apps and games they sell on Steam are, and the MuskPhone exists only in the sphere of myth (and if it exists, it will likely be a standard Android phone with a Muskian App Store and some extra apps pre-loaded), so I won’t even entertain those hypotheticals.
@kurkosdr
I wouldn’t say Valve is not interested in mobile. AFAIK Steam Deck already shipped a million units. And that is by itself rather close to mobile. Close to Ubuntu Touch alike devices. As for Musk and his potential ambitions. At minimum he will need (mobile) clients for Starlink. He was always somehow into payment systems. He is a geek with Jobs alike influence. Somehow it feels natural. For him to at some point selling you a mobile device. And obviously you will buy it. It’s our job (geeks and nerds) to try to put in GNU/Linux with upstream drivers (decade(s) of upgrades possible) and opt-in option for root access. As you in general don’t care. You won’t mind all that. If Musk won’t end up doing it. Then i am rather sure it will be somebody else. It’s bound to happen. For a while it looked like Google might do it. But now it’s taking them too long. Hence likely they don’t plan to do that in foreseeable future.
kurkosdr,
Microsoft made blunders and had bad timing. The mobile product they ended up killing was actually a good product IMHO, but it was too late. The same product might have succeeded a few years earlier with new mover advantages, but it didn’t happen. Once a duopoly took hold the market dynamics made it extremely difficult for any competitors to gain critical mass. The price for success would go up year over year and now the price of entry is likely many billions of dollars once you have a working finished product.
Some alternative operating systems try to be source and API compatible with a dominant platform to lesson the barriers to entry. While this can conceivably help, it brings in a lot of baggage and sacrifices creative control. Like ReactOS, you end up a clone perpetually behind the original, or even WSL1. Microsoft’s solution for WSL1 was to stop trying to implement the linux kernel but just to run the real thing in a VM. This comes with technical pros and cons, but has one serious advantage: WSL2 gets linux updates for free and they no longer need to play catch up.
…so it makes me wonder if the WSL2 approach would also be viable for alternative mobile platforms. IOS being vendor locked and proprietary rules itself out, but transparently running a real android AOSP environment in a VM might be a possibility. AOSP gets you 90% of the way there, but there’s still a problem in that the open parts of AOSP is incomplete and many android apps rely on google’s proprietary libraries and services. Still, achieving a similar compatibility level to lineage OS, while not perfect, would be pretty good. Ultimately though I think we can all agree it would take a lot of money to break into the market even with compatibility and the fact that developers are still targeting android rather than your platform would still be a disadvantage even though you are compatible.
I suspect valve is interested, but until courts rule against anti-competitive prohibitions on 3rd party app stores for IOS in particular, then they will always remain disadvantaged and there can be no meritocracy. IMHO users would be extremely interested in a 3rd party mobile store that did not lock them into one ecosystem.
I`ve read somewhere that skipping between Ubuntu versions isn`t easy, there was much changes. So when we add lack of developers we end up with 16.04 as base.
Who is running Ubuntu on a Phone? Is there any manufacturer that ships a phone with this?…guess I’m out of the loop.