14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has been publishing Ubuntu Touch images and the developers used different channels to make their work known. That's about to change as the Ubuntu devs prepare to make some modifications to the current system.
Until now, the Ubuntu Touch project was separated into various channels that served different purposes. You can tell which one is stable, which is just for testing, and everything in between. In fact, there is now a channel for the BQ phone and one for the new Meizu Ubuntu MX4. They all make sense and it's good to have them clearly separated, but there is at least one issue with this particular model.
Users have no means of switching from one channel to another. For example, if you are using the current stable build and the developers choose to change the base for the system, they are going to create another channel for that. This means that users will have to reflash their phone to get to the new channel, and that is inconvenient, to say the least. The same will happen if you are running a testing version and you want to switch to the stable, or vice versa.
Switching channels should become easier
This problem has become evident in the past few months and the devs from Canonical are trying to figure out how to proceed. It's not an easy problem and it will take some time to implement a solution.
"Today Steve started doing clean-up in our ubuntu-touch channels. As per the new spec, the main change is that we will no longer provide per-ubuntu-series image channels. We need to have the flexibility of changing the underlying system seamlessly, without users having to switch to a different channel after a selected series is released. Once this is done, we will provide an useful list of all officially available channels with their descriptions," said Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak.
There is no timetable for this measure, but it's likely that we'll see something done in this regard pretty soon.