The UBports project, which took over the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform after Canonical pulled away from it, has published an OTA-21 (over-the-air) firmware update. The project is also developing an experimental port of the Unity 8 desktop, which has been renamed to Lomiri.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-21 update is for BQ E4.5/E5/M10/U Plus, Cosmo Communicator, F(x)tec Pro1, Fairphone 2/3, Google Pixel 2XL/3a, Huawei Nexus 6P, LG Nexus 4/ 5, Meizu MX4/Pro 5, Nexus 7 2013, OnePlus 2/3/5/6/One, Samsung Galaxy Note 4/S3 Neo+, Sony Xperia X/XZ/Z4, Vollaphone, Xiaomi Mi A2/A3, Xiaomi Poco F1 , Xiaomi Redmi 3s/3x/3sp/4X/7, Xiaomi Redmi Note 7/7 Pro. Separately, without the "OTA-21" tag, updates will be prepared for Pine64 PinePhone and PineTab devices.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-21 is still based on Ubuntu 16.04, but lately the development efforts have been focused on preparing for the transition to Ubuntu 20.04. Of the changes in OTA-21, a redesign of the screen with information about the filling of drives is noted, the number of categories has been expanded, and the accuracy of information about free space in system partitions has been improved. Changed the look of the interface shown before unlocking the screen to include several different styles depending on whether you use PIN or password to unlock.
Preparations have been made for use on devices of the Halium 10 layer, which provides a low-level layer to simplify hardware support. For devices supported in Halium 9, plug-ins are included to enable magnetometer and compass sensors. The Media-Hub service responsible for playing sound and video applications, as well as the client library associated with it, have been rewritten, which has been translated to use Qt classes to reduce the number of dependencies and simplify code base maintenance. The rework also reduced the size of the qtubuntu-media plugin (provides the QtMultimedia API) on disk, getting rid of extra layers and reducing memory consumption.
Source: opennet.ru