Ubuntu Touch will receive a new OTA update before the end of the year, but it's a small hotfix. From the looks of it, developers still have one more thing to implement, but some regressions spotted during Q&A are delaying the release.

Ubuntu Touch has a six-week release cycle, but a hotfix update might get unveiled in the meantime if there are enough problems to warrant one. Now that the end of the year festivities are upon us, the development cycle is getting delayed anyway, and developers took this opportunity to push some important updates.

Details about the Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.5 have been surfacing this past week, and it's something that users are really looking for, especially since a few of the fixes will directly influence battery life, and that is always something to look out for.

Duration of Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.5 delay is unknown

The developers are not advancing any precise launch dates because they don't know if the image will get past the Q&A process. That's not all that unusual, but it's likely that it won't be long now, and the delay should be just a couple of days away if nothing else out of the ordinary happens.

Canonical's Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak says that the "OTA-8.5 story continues. Most likely the release will get slightly delayed due to regressions spotted during QA testing. Even though the overall number of changes included in the hotfix is small, some of the fixes required touching a lot of components - introducing additional regression risk."

Two important problems have been fixed. First of all, the Location function was not turned off when GPS and Location were disabled from the indicator, and installing apps was made impossible due to a time skew causing invalid signatures for a U1 account.

Also, it looks like the development for the bigger OTA-9 update has been stopped since the devs have encountered some problems with the Qt5 migration, but that should be solved pretty soon as well.