Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak informs us today, January 12, 2016, about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch team in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices.

According to Mr. Zemczak, the Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 update is getting closer to being ready for deployment on users' devices, as the development team will prepare some important improvements for inclusion into the final images, such as a big QtMir update, a new Trust Store release, and fixes for the emulator.

However, since our previous report, the Ubuntu Touch developers managed to add camera access support in the Web Browser app by adding new libhybris and android components, update the Dialer and Messaging apps with support for the new Address Book header, as well as to update the Address Book app with a new bottom edge.

"We're getting closer to being change-ready for OTA-9," said Łukasz Zemczak. "We are also hoping to get some emulator fixes in before the release - in case we don't, we might cherry-pick those later and do a separate emulator only release. It's been a very long time since we last had a new generic image promoted."

Ubuntu Download Manager improvements, new tools

In addition to the improvements mentioned above, the team also fixed some bugs in the Ubuntu Download Manager app, as well as to modify the commit log URL paths, so that they're more related to the device and channel for which they were generated. There's now a decoder ring tool for Ubuntu Touch.

In related news, Ubuntu Touch devs are reminded that the Landing Team Tools branch has a similar command-line tool, called map-image, which they can get via Bazaar, using the lp:landing-team-tools repository. Tomorrow we shall have more details about the new features implemented in Ubuntu Touch OTA-9.