14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developers are preparing to launch a new major update for the phone version of the OS, and they are now pretty certain that the patch will arrive on Monday.
The initial launch date for OTA-5, the official name of the update, was July 15. Things don't always work as they should, and some minor issues have delayed the release of the update. As it happens, July 15 was a Wednesday, and that would have been a very good day for a launch. Launching major updates after Wednesday is problematic because you never know if things will go smoothly.
There is always the possibility that something might go wrong with the update process, with the update itself, and so on. If you're launching on Friday, then you have to work all weekend to fix things. And it's not just one guy, it's an army of programmers. That is why the new date, July 20, is a much better fit. It's a Monday, so there is plenty of time to correct any problems.
OTA-5 is a huge update
OTA means over the air so that everyone will get the update on Monday. It brings full shell rotation, new SMS functions, browser improvements, new icons, and a lot more.
"The fix for the custom tarball issue discovered in OTA-5 is now in a silo but will also require a custom tarball re-spin for everything to work. Since the bug only affects arale devices we decided that we will respin the OTA-5 image only for that platform. The same fix will be picked up with the next update for others anyway. We are preparing everything for the OTA-5 release on Monday. As mentioned before, phased updates won't be used for this release meaning it will be released to everyone at once, without a grace period. Along with the update we will, of course, provide some nice changelogs for everyone to read," wrote Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak.
Unlike the previous release, this time Canonical won't use phased updates, which means that everyone will get it at the same time and now spread out over 24 hours. So, starting Monday morning, we'll start checking for system updates on our phones every 5 minutes.