The UBports project, which took over the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform after Canonical pulled away from it, has published an OTA-16 (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-16 update is available for OnePlus One, Fairphone 2, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2013, Meizu MX4/PRO 5, VollaPhone, Bq Aquaris E5/E4.5/M10, Sony Xperia X/XZ, OnePlus smartphones 3/3T, Xiaomi Redmi 4X, Huawei Nexus 6P, Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet, Google Pixel 3a, OnePlus Two, F(x)tec Pro1/Pro1 X, Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and compared to the past With the release, the formation of stable builds for Xiaomi Mi A2 and Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo + (GT-I9301I) devices began. Separately, without the βOTA-16β tag, updates for Pine64 PinePhone and PineTab devices will be prepared.
According to the developers, OTA-16 has become one of the largest releases in the history of the project, second only to OTA-4, which switched from Ubuntu 15.04 to 16.04, in terms of significance. The Qt framework has been updated to version 5.12.9 (previously released 5.9.5), which led to changes in about a third of binary packages, including updates to packages that Qt components depend on or that are tied to obsolete features of old Qt branches . Moving to a new release of Qt allows developers to move on to the next major milestone, upgrading the base environment from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 20.04.
The Qt update also provided the functionality needed to integrate gst-droid, a GStreamer plugin for Android. This plug-in made it possible to use hardware acceleration in the camera application (viewfinder) on PinePhone devices and provided support for video recording on 32-bit devices originally shipped with the Android 7 platform, such as the Sony Xperia X.
Another important innovation was the inclusion of the Anbox environment installer by default, which provides the ability to run Android applications. Devices that support Anbox installation include Meizu PRO 5, Fairphone 2, OnePlus One, Nexus 5, BQ Aquaris M10 HD and BQ Aquaris M10 FHD. Installing the Anbox environment is done without changing the Ubuntu Touch root file system and without being tied to Ubuntu Touch releases.
The default Morph web browser has been significantly updated, in which work with downloads has been completely redone. Instead of a dialog blocking the interface, displayed at the beginning and end of the download, the panel has an indicator that reflects the progress of the download. In addition to the general list of downloads, the "Recent Downloads" panel has been added, which displays only downloads launched in the current session. Added a button to the tab management screen to reopen recently closed tabs. The ability to customize the identifier passed in the User Agent header has been returned. Added an option to permanently block access to location data. Resolved issues with scaling settings. Simplified use of Morph on tablets and desktops.
Support for the outdated Oxide web engine (based on QtQuick WebView, has not been updated since 2017) has been discontinued, which was replaced by a QtWebEngine-based engine a long time ago, to which all basic Ubuntu Touch applications have been transferred. Due to the removal of Oxide, applications using the outdated engine will no longer function.
Source: opennet.ru