Hello there!
I’m here to report about the current efforts in Ubuntu Touch revolving around Snap support.
We’ve slowed down a bit but are now back to polishing up patches to snapd in order to get them ready for upstream acceptance. At UBports we’ve moved from a fork to a packaging repo to maintain our divergence from upstream in a proper manner.
snapd will ship with our upcoming Ubuntu Touch release based on 24.04 noble by default.
snapd in the UBPorts GitLab has 3 distinct patches ontop of snapd master. It features:
- Android environment passthrough through /android + /system and /vendor compat symlinks
- Early renaming of unity8-related interfaces to lomiri
- Maliit keyboard interface on classic systems
These patches on top make it worthwhile to package Pocket VMs as a Snap and have OSK offered through Maliit, until we have a Wayland-based OSK framework in place.
Another one is the Lomiri renaming patch which makes things like media-hub work more easily with the host system. Media Hub is the service allowing out-of-process video decoding on Ubuntu Touch systems. That plus Location Services should be closer to working.
All of those patches have upstream Pull Requests open.
For graphics we have the hybris-2404 Snap which hooks up OpenGL ES via libhybris. This means that core24 snaps requiring graphics should Just Work ™.
Let’s wait and see how good snapd on Ubuntu Touch gets!