by April and May 2025
The Ubuntu Touch project continues…
After my last post thinking about ways to deal with the current world situation and, in particular, developments in the USA, I was considering the importance of more secure mobile communications. I have been in various mobile ecosystems over the years and until last year had a Ubuntu Touch project running on my Volla22. This project was literally (s)quashed after the device fell off the motorbike and was run over.
I decided to do a bit of research about the current state of things and procured a used Oneplus 6 from ebay. The device was in good condition although battery flat so I charged it up and got it fired up into Android 9. After entering developer mode, I unlocked the bootloader (OEM bootlocker), enabled USB Debugging and also activated a very useful developer option which gives you the option on restart to choose fastboot/recovery/start in a menu.
I had ubports installed at 0.9.7 beta on Fedora Linux and used this to install a Ubuntu Touch port onto the Oneplus 6. It needed a couple of tries but on about the third or fourth go it went through successfully and thunderbirds were go (so to speak).
OnePlus 6
Ubuntu Touch is very smooth and capable on the Oneplus 6, now on OTA 8 (I think) based on Ubuntu 20.04. I have installed a range of useful apps. The previously known caveats are still around but the core functionality is nice. From a 2025 perspective, it is refreshingly simple and fairly uncomplicated (for a linux phone), there are no overwhelming numbers of apps in the store just a few essentials. With a bit of patience it can have a good basic functionality with email, some messaging etc. The libertine option is still there for desktop linux software. I have installed Waydroid but haven’t activated it yet. I would like to get Firefox installed and working but haven’t found a good way to do this yet.
So, all in all, I’m pretty pleased that with €86 I have a capable and fairly safe if somewhat unusual mobile phone which is entirely independent of any bigtech companies from San Francisco. I have ordered a cheap SIM card for 4G calls so will test that as soon as it arrives.
The Ubuntu Touch project is up and running again 😊
More Ubuntu Touch things…
Yup, the snapz0r install doesn’t seem to work on oneplus6 yet due to some issues to do with the installation and partition sizes. Thus, the vivaldi option isn’t there yet but I do have a useful better browser installed so a lot of modern functionality works via that.
I have installed the delta chat app which is an excellent and decentralised way to communicate and send files between ubuntu touch, iOS and Linux (or even Windows if needs be) desktops:
