Ubuntu Touch is powered by several key components: the Android compatibility layer Halium, the desktop environment Lomiri, and the UBports Installer. These elements are the lifeblood of Ubuntu Touch, making it a unique and powerful OS.

Love tinkering with open-source projects? Align with FOSS ideals? Enjoy tackling unique challenges? We’d love to have you on board! We've got documentation to get you started and if you'd like to chat, you can join the UBports Core Development group here.

LomiriHaliumUBports InstallerClickable
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Lomiri

Lomiri is the user interface of Ubuntu Touch, providing the graphical shell and core applications that users interact with daily. Built on the Qt framework, its defining feature is convergence, which allows for a seamless, adaptive experience across different screen sizes. This means Lomiri can present a touch-optimized interface on a phone while transforming into a full-featured, windowed desktop environment when connected to an external monitor. In effect, the shell rearranges itself to best suit the available display and input methods, from touch gestures to a full keyboard and mouse.

Halium

Halium is an open-source project which bridges the gap between Android hardware abstraction layers (HAL) and Ubuntu Touch. It leverages libhybris, which allows the system to use Android hardware drivers, making it possible to use hardware like camera's and sensors. libhybris in effect translates Android-specific drivers to non-Android Linux kernels.

UBports Installer

The UBports Installer is a user-friendly desktop application designed to make installing Ubuntu Touch simple and safe for everyone. It automates the entire process by bundling all necessary tools and system images into a single, easy-to-use package, removing the need for complex command-line operations. The tool guides you step-by-step, from putting your device into the correct mode to downloading the appropriate OS version and flashing it onto the device. This approach makes Ubuntu Touch accessible to a wider audience, ensuring a reliable installation experience without requiring deep technical knowledge.

Clickable

Clickable is a powerful command-line tool for developers, created to streamline the process of building and packaging applications for Ubuntu Touch. It utilizes Docker containers to provide a clean, isolated build environment for each project, which simplifies cross-compilation and dependency management. This allows developers to easily compile their applications for ARM-based phones directly from their x86 desktop computers. Clickable handles the full development cycle, from project creation and building to testing on a device and packaging the final app into a .click file for distribution.

Apps are the lifeblood of any mobile operating system, and Ubuntu Touch is no exception. They're divided into three different categories and we're looking for contributors in all three of them. Want to try your hand at developing apps for Ubuntu Touch? Whether you’re eager to learn something new or just want to join a thriving community of passionate enthusiasts, we’ve got the tools, documentation, and frameworks ready for you to explore.

Core AppsEssential AppsOther Apps

Core Apps

Core Apps are apps that come pre-installed with every version of Ubuntu Touch and are provided by the UBports community. When we make Ubuntu Touch images available for installation, these apps are automatically included.

Imagine using a smartphone without a dialer or clock for example, it just wouldn't work. That’s why we rely on contributors, maintainers, and volunteers to verify, improve, and polish these critical apps.

What does a maintainer do? Well, they're responsible for reviewing merge requests, triages, investigates issue reports and helps develop the app. 

So are you interested in contributing? You can check out the list of Core Apps below or click here to go to the Core Apps repository.

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Essential Apps

Essential Apps are applications that every user needs for a good experience. Our device partners collect feedback from their users and tell us what their users miss the most, we then Think of music players, messaging apps, photo editors, pretty much any kind of app that a user would use every day.

Basic functionality works on most of these, but they are looking for active developers and maintainers who can contribute to making these apps as good as they can possibly be. Sounds like you? Feel free to click on one of the apps to get to know more.

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Other Apps

At the UBports Foundation, we encourage app creators to develop amazing apps for Ubuntu Touch. We've launched several projects to help you learn how to build apps for Ubuntu Touch such as a tutorial on how to get started and detailed documentation explaining everything about App Development. Whatever a developer might need to make their own app, we've got it and fully support it.

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