The updates have been phased out to the users

Apr 17, 2015 14:44 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has finally released a third OTA update for Ubuntu Touch, and users should start receiving them in the next few hours.

Ubuntu developers have been working on this update for quite some time, and it's been postponed for a few days due to some small issues. In any case, the new update is finally here, and Ubuntu Touch users, including owners of Bq phones, should get it anytime now.

Besides the numerous fixes and improvements that have been implemented in this latest OTA update and that we have already covered, Canonical is also making a small modification to the way the OTA updates are distributed. Starting with this version, OTA updates will be phased, which means that they won't become available to everyone at the same time. An ever-increasing number of users will get them, and in the course of just one day they will be available to all.

Phased updates are safer

Now that clients are using Ubuntu phones, the developers need to be extra careful. They need to make sure that, if a bug creeps through the testing process, it won't hit everyone at the same time, hence the need to phased updates.

"We also mentioned that this update is the first one proceeding in a phased process. This means that the update will span initially throughout a period of 24 hours, with every 'step' making the update appearing as available to more and more people until finally appearing on all devices. This is a safety measure that gives us time to back-off the update in the very unlikely case of some critical issue getting reported - making sure not all devices suddenly go bad. Of course, we made sure that nothing like that can happen, but we prefer to be super safe," wrote  Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak.

Developers are now working to stabilize the Vivid based version of Ubuntu Touch and we should see new major updates, with new features, in the coming months.