Ubuntu Touch update brings better support for modern smartphones & web apps

Ubuntu Touch is a mobile Linux distribution designed to run on smartphones and tablets. But since the project was abandoned by Canonical, it’s been maintained by a relatively small team of volunteers at UBPorts, so the list of officially supported devices is fairly small, and major updates don’t come around all that often.But Ubuntu 24.04-2.0 Beta is a fairly big update that brings a number of major improvements including better support for a common feature on modern smartphones, and better support for recent websites and web apps.While the new release is still based on a version of Ubuntu that was released for desktops and servers more than two years ago, UBPorts considers this a “feature update” that brings more than the usual bug fixes.One major new feature is support for phones with camera notches and rounded corners. Earlier versions of Ubuntu Touch would basically ignore these and draw the screen under them, which meant that some elements could be cut off or hidden. Now Ubuntu Touch can adapt the user interface to avoid those dead zones… although the feature needs to be enabled on a per-device basis. At launch only a handful of devices are supported, but the number could grow over time as more device maintainers implement this feature.Ubuntu Touch notch supportUbuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 also brings a big update to the Morph Browser. Previously based on Google Chromium 87, the new version is based on Chromium 134. That’s still not the latest version of Google’s open source web browser, but it brings about 5 years worth of updates by updating the base software from a version of Chromium released in 2020 to one that came out in 2025.Morph BrowserThe browser also now has an optional installer for Widevine DRM, which should allow you to stream video and access other web content that wouldn’t otherwise be available. UBPorts notes that this implementation “is considered by some to be in legally grey area,” though since Morph isn’t officially licensed to support Widevine and instead uses a version “extracted from a legal distribution containing Widevine.” So there’s a chance this could stop working at some point and/or get users in trouble in some regions.Another update in Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 include a screenshot editor that lets you crop, rotate, or adjust colors of screenshots immediately after capturing an image. You can then save the picture or share it with an application on your device. And there’s no optional support for printing from your device, allowing you to send print jobs to a printer on your wireless network.You can find more details, including some known issues that the team is still working to resolve, in the release announcement.