
An experience with Ubuntu Touch development - cmsimike
http://zxstudio.org/blog/2016/04/06/experience-ubuntu-touch-development/
======
luxpir
I'll answer any basic questions anyone has about using the Ubuntu phone - been
using it for over 18 months now. Never have actually owned an Android/iOS
phone and hope to keep it that way. It does everything I want it to. Not
'beautifully', but it does it. It's cheap, open and supports free software.

Ideally I'm still looking for some alternative device that matches or
surpasses the N900 in terms of functionality and openness. But I'm of course
not holding my breath. With UT I get SSH and terminal access, but it is
slightly hamstrung in terms of what can be installed from repos, unless I
forego the OTA updates.

A quick ideal-world scenario: a phone/mobile PC store on the highstreet where
you can browse great hardware running Red Hat, Debian and the BSDs. All dirt
simple to use with the ability to pop the hood (terminal, repos) whenever you
needed a little more tooling. Devices perhaps in two parts, one pocket-size
and one bag/large-pocket size, slotting together for storage and charging.

UT is still working on convergence, and has made great strides from what I can
tell, but it's still some way off being a useful reality for any more than a
handful of devs.

~~~
CaptSpify
How often do you use the terminal and/or SSH, and what for?

I kept hearing for a long time how great $this or $that android ssh-client or
terminal was, but they were all terrible IME. I am quite picky though, and
spend >1/2 my day in terminal. All I want is a good terminal session, with
ssh, on my phone.

~~~
luxpir
I actually use it for personal more than work stuff. Connecting to the pi@home
to restart kodi, set up a torrent, check IMs/IRC.

Changed a shortcut in tmux to get around the quirks with not having a keyboard
(it offers a menu for Esc and common Ctrl+ shortcuts).

I won't tell you it's perfect, sure you're not expecting that. Serviceable
though. Setting it up in 'convergence mode' could actually work for you,
perhaps with a tablet instead of phone, if you're so terminal-based. Reminder:
the phone cost ~£100.

------
teekert
I think they need to support more flagship phones, or popular ones like the
MotoG of Nexus phones. That takes away risk, you can buy a good Android Phone
and play with Ubuntu Touch. The Meizu's are not so appealing to me.

Currently the OnePlus3 port is under development [0], I think it would be
great if that starts to work. The OP3 also has 6 GB of RAM, making it very
well suited for Convergence (their name for getting a desktop interface when
attaching mouse/keyboard/monitor).

[0] [https://devices.ubports.com/#/op3](https://devices.ubports.com/#/op3)

~~~
wvh
They seem to have the same problem Jolla has – a phone OS without devices.
Every once in a while a smaller hardware manufacturer (BQ, PuzzlePhone,
FairPhone, Turing Phone, etc) makes some promises or actual releases a model
with some support, but those companies are struggling themselves for any real
market share – or mind-share. I guess the margins are too low to grow fast
enough and get leverage against the big manufacturers and the default Android
choice.

I really hope one of these more open-source friendly companies gets a foothold
in the phone space, even if it happens by courting markets in countries like
Russia and China who are politically less than thrilled about handing over too
much information to American companies like Google and Apple.

------
z3t4
I hope this project takes off. Would love to have a completely open source
mobile phone or tablet.

I think the key is low entry barrier for developers. Developing an SDK/IDE is
too much work, and personally I feel _locked in_ and rather use the command
line instead. A fast emulator or a KVM image would also be nice.

~~~
pjmlp
You do you do great UI design with the command line?

~~~
majewsky
I've had a marvelous experience building HTML5 UIs in my command-line vim.

~~~
pjmlp
I bet you had lots of productive hours save/browser refresh fun cycles making
something like Material design with that workflow.

What about the users, have they had a marvelous experience using that UI?

~~~
zdkl
There exist tools outside of your apparent zone of comfort that let us do
whatever we damn please from the command line. I think you'd be surprised how
much user facing code was written using Emacs/Vim.

~~~
pjmlp
I was already coding in the 80's, back then it was called VI.

So I know pretty well how the UNIX System V experience for GUI programming
looks like.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
And I used Windows already back in the 90s, so I know exactly what the PC
experience looks like with all its BSODs and token rings.

~~~
pjmlp
At least it already had RAD GUI tools that cared about usability while most
UNIX terminals that I was still using in 1994 were green phosphor ones.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Well, speak for yourself. About the same time, our local university had very
impressive Irix X-terminals with a rock solid GUI.

It might be that you have only had a small glimpse of the things beyond PCs
back then. And that seems to still have an impact on your perception of things
on the "Unix" side ;)

~~~
pjmlp
You mean like this in 1991?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-
NICzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg)

I would have rather used the GUI tooling of a NeXT, which eschews the UNIX
traditions even though it builds partially on top of them, than the Solaris
way of programming GUIs, if given the option.

Just because I could only access green phosphor terminals, doesn't mean I
wasn't aware of other, more expensive, options.

------
tombert
I feel like the ease in which developers can make applications for a new
system plays a pretty vital role in that system's success.

For example, the Sega Saturn (from my understanding) was ridiculously hard to
program for, and consequently a lot of the games for it were objectively worse
than their PlayStation counterparts (with some exceptions).

My point here is that if Ubuntu wants to compete, I think it's incredibly
smart to make it approachable for devs to just jump right in; I know the
entire experience isn't polished right now as evidenced by this article, but
it doesn't look insurmountable, and I'm optimistic.

~~~
fzzzy
The Saturn had 8 processors! Two main processors, two sound processors, two
graphics processors, a processor for controlling the bus and interconnect, and
a processor dedicated to the cd-rom.

~~~
tombert
That's what I mean!

We're only now getting to a point where people really know how to take full
advantage of multi(core/processor) systems and are given nice frameworks in
which to do so; in the mid-90's I'm pretty sure that that was a really
difficult task!

------
Apocryphon
What I really want to know is what the adoption rate of Ubuntu Touch is among
the hacker/hobbyist/diehard Linux crowd. Firefox OS has lost its official
support on smartphone, no idea where Sailfish OS is at, so Canonical should be
doing everything they can to make their platform the alternative to the big 2.
Are they?

~~~
CannisterFlux
It seems quite low I think. Part of the problem is that Android is just so
ubiquitous. As the article mentions "Developing for Ubuntu Touch right now is
not easy, mainly because of lack of documentation and examples". Android has a
million examples, libraries, first and third party documentation, a load
people at Google improving the tools all the time (though this churn can also
be a bad thing of course...) Canonical has less of this and the development
plan seems focused on Web apps.

Another problem is that there are no Ubuntu phones currently available to buy
new. The Meizu mentioned in the article is no longer sold, and installing on
semi-supported hardware is flakey. For example, you can buy a Meizu phone that
has Android and reflash it with Ubuntu Touch, but then future OTA updates
don't work and you have to reflash each time. Devices sold on ebay might not
be the so-called "international version" and therefore have a locked
bootloader, you don't know until you buy one.

The way updates are handled and the community support seem much more organised
than with Firefox OS though. That was a complete disaster, with the first gen
ZTE phones receiving no updates at all and even the Flame (a developer device)
being pretty much abandoned right away. At least Canonical keep pushing OTAs
for the official BQ and Meizu devices, and builds for Nexus devices are still
produced so you can flash it on semi-common hardware if you're feeling brave.

I know it's easy to say and very difficult to do, but really what Canonical
need is a phone that has some long-term availability. You often hear Alan Pope
on podcasts use the excuse that it is not Canonical's problem that devices are
not being sold, it is up to the manufacturers. But if there are no devices to
buy then how is UT ever going to gain any real traction?

~~~
popey
You can actually flash a Meizu and continue to get OTA updates now.

------
millstone
Google cache mirror
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qComzDs...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qComzDs4uSAJ:zxstudio.org/blog/2016/04/06/experience-
ubuntu-touch-development/)

------
fsiefken
How does Ubuntu Touch compare performance wise (battery and speed) and
developer friendlyness with that other open OS Tizen, which uses Wayland
instead of Mir for display operations? Does Ubuntu Touch have an Android
compatibility layer?

As Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler of Enlightenment fame) is involved and Samsung
intends to run it on every device I think it might be more efficient. It also
has a socalled 'Ultra Power Saving Mode' built in.

The Tizen Samsung Z2 has been released for 70 euro in India last week and in
Africa soon Tizen might be destined to take a significant portion of the
mobile space. The development tools seem open enough, you could even run UE4
html5 games (that goes for both Ubuntu One and Tizen I assume)
[https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Game_development](https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Game_development)

~~~
pjmlp
Tizen already went through so many reboots on their SDK stack that I wouldn't
bother with it.

It started with Meego adoption, then they brought the BADA OS SDK C++ (think
Symbian C++ like experience), followed by re-writing everything in C, and
offering a new C++ API on top of it when developers rebelled to go back to C.

Also regarding the HTML5 stack, there are lots of dead mobile OSes that tried
that route already.

I doubt anyone in the markets where Tizen was released is bothered to target
it instead of Android, unless Samsung is paying them.

------
afandian
I would love to know if there are any developers out there writing for Ubuntu
Touch. I got a Aquaris BQ M10 tablet and it has virtually no apps available.
What comes preinstalled is anaemic and barely works. And the promised
'desktop' feature is DOA.

It's gathering dust until some more developers come and make stuff for it!

~~~
reddotX
there are some apps for the tablet and phones
[https://uappexplorer.com/apps?sort=-points](https://uappexplorer.com/apps?sort=-points)

~~~
afandian
Thanks! That links broken for me though.

~~~
padraic7a
Could it be your browser / https / an extension? It works for me in Firefox
and Chrome but not ie.

~~~
afandian
Oh yeah it works in Chrome but not on my mobile browser (I just got a blank
screen).

~~~
digi_owl
A JS issue perhaps? Seems it shows crap all without it turned on.

------
cjhanks
Ubuntu Touch and the idea of a device capable of fulfilling two modalities
(active typing, passive reading) is wonderful.

Unfortunately most hardware and firmware is as awful as software. I pity Intel
network driver writers and Android ROM writers...

Companies spend millions working around the imperfections of software logic
and hardware creations. In a bubble Ubuntu philosophy is wonderful. In
reality, it seems, we are collectively far from realizing the brilliance of
our own creations in simple terms.

