Ubuntu Touch OTA-8

Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom respecting mobile operating system by UBports.

Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-8!
OTA-8 is appearing as a staged rollout for all supported Ubuntu Touch devices over the next five days, completing on Sunday, March 10th.
You can skip to How to get OTA-8 to get it right away if you're impatient, or read on to learn more about this release.

What's new?

OTA-8 is primarily a stability improvement release as we continue to work on using upstream technologies in Ubuntu Touch, increasing our project output. You can read the full changelog here.

Morph Browser

Chris has continued his work to make the Morph Browser better, bringing the following improvements :

• Dark Theme
• Display a themed error page when page loading fails, fixes ubports/morph-browser#133: ubports/morph-browser#121
• Fix failure to load initial page of some webapps, fixes ubports/morph-browser#118: ubports/morph-browser#121
• Close all tabs in a window before closing the window, stopping any media in the window, fixes ubports/morph-browser#143: ubports/morph-browser#144
• Add custom user scripts for webapps, fixes ubports/morph-browser#124: ubports/morph-browser#140
• Bring back favicons: ubports/morph-browser#141
• When determining the height of the keyboard rectangle, take Screen.devicePixelRatio into account, fixes ubports/morph-browser#52 and others: ubports/ubuntu-ui-toolkit#25
• Fix system theme support for tab headers, fixes ubports/morph-browser#142: ubports/morph-browser#146

Ubuntu Touch has an experimental system-wide dark theme that is supported by most of the core apps and many of the apps in the OpenStore. Since it is experimental, it can only be enabled using the UT Tweak Tool (though some apps such as Weather, FluffyChat and TELEports have it as a built in option). This update completes support for the dark theme in the browser.

This update also fixes the display of browser error pages, brings back favicon support for favorites, and allows apps to inject custom JavaScript into embedded Morph.Web views.

Test, test... 1, 2...

Until this point, we've been bad developers. In an effort to bootstrap Ubuntu Touch as quickly as possible, we disabled automated testing in our CI and relied on manual testing runs in the weeks leading up to our releases. That hadn't caused problems yet, but we knew it would. During this cycle, we re-enabled automated testing in our CI and watched as some packages failed to rebuild. Then, we got to work fixing those tests. In particular, Rodney contributed the fixes required to get the test pass for the UITK, the toolkit used to create Ubuntu Touch applications. While fixing tests doesn't usually result in user-facing changes, it ensures that we can make changes with confidence and work faster in the future.

Thank you

We'd like to extend our appreciation to everyone who made this release possible, especially those people who stepped up to test OTA-8 on a variety of devices after our call for testing.

How can I help with the creation of Ubuntu Touch?

Ubuntu Touch is a community project driven mainly by volunteers. You and all others in the community will benefit from your contribution. Everyone is able to do something to help!

Development

To get help and support when getting started with Ubuntu Touch development, you can join our Matrix room '#ut_bootcamp:matrix.org'. Developers gather there specifically to help newcomers get started with our development workflows. It is a friendly space, with the motto "There is no such thing as a stupid question!".
We mark issues which probably have simple fixes with a good first issue tag.