ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Mathijs Veen <mathijsv33n@xxxxxxxxx>]

There will be
no further phones or any other official or specific devices. Any future
phones will be community ports to existing devices. Am I the only one
getting that impression?

I don't think Rodney Dawes was saying that at all, and it doesnt really add
up with what Canonical is doing at the moment: focusing on Unity8 (be it
mostly on desktop atm)
One needs, I think, to keep being aware of WHY Canonical wants to move to
unity8: because -in the end- they want one interface for all devices. Not
just the desktop. If desktop was all that they wanted, why would they
invest soo much on a new Unity version based on Qt and have a new display
server run it? They would need only to invest a fraction of their time to
improve and tweak Unity7 and they would be scoring much more points with
the 20 milion+ desktop users they have now.
But they dont. They pour most of the resources into Unity8 right now. They
would only do this if, in time, they really want and expect to power phones
and tablets again. In other words: the very fact that Canonical is working
hard on Unity8 is actually proof they are NOT abandoning phones and tablets.
Only if Canonical were to announce that they are ditching their Unity8
efforts is when i would get worried about the future of phones.

The additional move from click to  snap has slowed us down and that is
unfortunate. Canonical sort of shot themselves in the foot by introducing
.clicks first. Click has been nucleus of what snap is now but the move from
one to the other has obviously set them back. For histories sake, i would
be very interested to know whether or not it was already decided in 2013 at
the launch of the first ubuntu touch image that .click was  going to be a
temporary thing. Snap is an additional improvement on Ubuntu but it doesnt
say anything about the strategy for phones/tablets one way or another.

The worrysome part of Rodney Dawses last message is that he is obviously
saying that getting Unity8 to run with all that was developed on/for
phablet on desktop AND have it run properly  AND have it all running in a
snap environment is still going to take loads of work.
The additional problem I see now is that all the changes to Unity8 over the
last couple of months are -as far as we can tell- not being propperly
tested on touch devices. So I expect there will be quite a few
surprises/regressions to solve once U8 will be ported back to a phone.

So you are right in not expecting new devices any time soon. And I join you
in hoping we will see a developer Alpha snap-based release cadence for at
least the M10 and Meizu Pro5 so people can get a sense of what is and isnt
working on mobile atm and get some feedback going.

The fairphone 'push' is just what Canonical has always been doing:
supporting Community efforts. Nothing more or less. I don't see how it is
proof that Canonical has pulled back from the phone/tablet market.

Cheers,

Mathijs

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 2:37 PM, Paul Tait <paultait22@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The impression that I got was that the reason that the phones had been
> abandoned was because of the version of Android that was supported on the
> devices and therefore the kernel version it can run and the drivers that
> are available? As no-one is going to add support for newer Android versions
> and kernels, the phone is dead. Is that incorrect?
>
> Likewise the Fairphone 2 only supports Android 5, so is just as dead and
> will never support snaps or a snap based image. Is this not the case? This
> is certainly the impression that I have.
>
> Finally reading the big push that Canonical is giving the Fairphone 2,
> something not seen since the first phones launch, one can only conclude
> that this is the way forward and the reason for the silence. There will be
> no further phones or any other official or specific devices. Any future
> phones will be community ports to existing devices. Am I the only one
> getting that impression?
>
> Paul.
>
> On Friday, 24 February 2017 21:14:28 GMT, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > On Fri, 2017-02-24 at 21:37 +0100, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> >>
> >> Why Canonical is not supporting the existing BQ E4.5 and E5 devices
> >> with
> >> a new officially supported image and why you leave us alone (apart of
> >> security updates)
> >> and without any visible upgrade path, not even to a new hardware?
> >
> > This is not something I am able to answer.
> >
>
>
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