Ubuntu Touch 12 is here and these are its news

Recently, the guys from the UBports project (the one who took over the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform after Canonical parted ways with it) released the new version of their Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 firmware to the publisher, which is now available for all compatible smartphones and tablets officially equipped with Ubuntu-based firmware.

The new version of the firmware released by UBports is notable for the transition to the new releases of Mir 1.2 and the Unity 8.20 shell.

Even in the future, full support for the launch of Android applications is expected, based on the achievements of the Anbox project.

Main news of Ubuntu Touch 12

ubports includes final changes prepared by Canonical for Unity8. Support for Smart Areas (Scope) has been discontinued and the traditional home screen has been removed, instead a new App Launcher app home interface is proposed.

The display server Mir has been updated from version 0.24, shipped since 2015 to version 1.2, which has allowed customer service based on the Wayland protocol. Also, Wayland support is not yet available for Android platform based devices due to implementation unavailability, but build work for PinePhone and Raspberry Pi boards has already been transferred to Wayland.

With this, the next step will be to update to the current version of Mir 1.8, which will be much easier than changing from the 0.24 branch.

Other changes that are presented in this new version is the modification of the color palette, It provides a greater contrast separation of text and background.

Also the work done to improve the virtual keyboard is highlighted and that the ability to switch the keyboard to the edit form was added via a swipe gesture from below. Double tapping on an empty area in the edit form changes the cursor display and selection modes, the Done button now allows you to exit any mode.

In the Morph browser in private browsing mode, when exiting, only the data for the current session is deleted and not all existing sessions, plus it has an added option to control the removal of cookies in the settings.

On devices with multi-color LEDs, a color indication of the battery charge is added. When the charge is low, the indicator starts flashing orange, during charging it lights white, and when fully charged, it turns green.

On FairPhone 2 devices, the SIM card automatically switches to 4G mode without the need to manually transfer another slot to 2G mode.

The OAUTH keys themselves for Google services are involved, allowing you to sync with Google's calendar planner and address book. At the same time, Google blocks potentially vulnerable browsers on older engines, which may require changing the User Agent when connecting to Google services.

Of the other changes that are presented in this new version:

  • The layout of the dialog boxes has been optimized for almost all the default applications.
  • Modified the appearance of some controls to highlight button topography by moving the shadow down.
  • For Nexus 5, OnePlus One, and FairPhone 2, the driver required to start Anbox (the environment for running Android apps) has been added to the normal kernel.
  • In applications based on the web application container, the ability to download files has been added.
  • Added support for automatically adjusting page width to screen size. The next version is expected to update the QtWebEngine engine to version 5.14.

Get Ubuntu Touch 12

If you are interested in trying this new update, you should know that was generated for smartphones OnePlus One, Fairphone 2, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2013, Meizu MX4 / PRO 5, Bq Aquaris E5 / E4.5 / M10.

The release is based on Ubuntu 16.04 (the OTA-3 build was based on Ubuntu 15.04, and from OTA-4, the transition to Ubuntu 16.04 was made).


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  1.   aldo ernesto gonzalez said

    I thought that in any Android 9 but I see that it is allowed in those phones only.
    Thanks I will be awaiting changes.