The work on the upcoming OTA-9 update continues, and it looks like things are on track. Ubuntu Touch will receive a new major upgrade in a couple of months.

The normal development cycle for one of these OTA updates is of about six weeks, but since December is coming and it is full of holidays and other celebrations, the work time of the Ubuntu developers will be limited.

Technically, it will take six weeks as well, but in practice it will be a little bit longer. This is not really an issue, but users expect any kind of changes and improvements with great interest.

For now, the team is still working on the older Ubuntu base, and it will take a little while until they switch to the new one, which will be Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus). It’s not a priority right now for them, and since Xerus is still pretty young itself, there is no point in making the switch.

Ubuntu Touch is improving every day

Not all the updates made to Ubuntu Touch are glorious. In fact, most of the changes happen under the hood, and we rarely get to see some of the stuff that has a visual impact.

“A rather quiet day in overall, nothing out of the ordinary. Velocity of landings is steady, with a new  pparmor-easyprof-ubuntu fixing html5 apparmor denials, ubuntu-system-settings-online-accounts for password prompt fixes and changes to account plugin visibility, signon, libaccounts-qt and accounts-qml-module. Today was also the day of the auto-upload for language packs. Still a lot of features in progress for OTA-9,” Canonical’s Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak wrote in this regular email.

The team is usually pushing a lot more stuff towards the end of the development cycle, so we’ll probably see many more changes then.

We should also keep in mind that a new device from BQ is being prepared, and most likely it will have video output capabilities. Some of you might have noticed that this part of the convergence story has been refined, and we have started to see people connecting their phones to TVs and peripheral.