14 DAY TRIAL // On December 8, Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch devs in preparation for the OTA-8.5 and OTA-9 software updates for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices.
According to Mr. Zemczak, the forthcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-8.5 hotfix is now in testing, and everything is in place for next week's release. The software update promises to fix many of those annoying issues reported by Ubuntu Phone users, as well as the regressions introduced in OTA-8.
"OTA-8.5 testing in progress! It looks that no obvious mistakes sneaked into the image itself so at least testing can go on normally," said Łukasz Zemczak, Ubuntu Foundations. "We don't have enough information still as QA only started last night, but no blockers have been found so far."
Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 receives new features for the January 20 launch
Now that OTA-8.5 is on its way, the Ubuntu Touch developers are currently working around the clock to add new features to the next major OTA update for Ubuntu Phones, the OTA-9. This should see the light of day on January 20, 2016, especially because the String and Feature Freeze is set for January 5 and the Final Freeze for January 8.
Among the new features implemented in Ubuntu Touch OTA-9, we can mention a new telephony-service with notification improvements, an updated Messaging app with landscape mode fixes, as well as new PulseAudio and Bluez version, which was synced with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) development branch of Ubuntu Touch.
Moreover, the Dialer app has received some improvements, along with the history-service package. In the meantime, the migration of the Ubuntu Touch operating system to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system is still in progress, as there are some issues with the Qt 5.5 packages, which will be resolved very soon.