A while back I purchased a Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition. Now initially the OS was in full heavy development and it was very exciting to watch it grow. We were all promised unlimited updates which in theory sounds great. I thought we would get all the great updates as the newer phones got released. Well fast forward a year and a half. It now turns out development is being halted and only work will continue on the phone OS for new phones.
Normally I would have no problem with that, except the OS development halting and the OS splitting into 2 versions (Click and Snap) has pretty much stopped development for all apps too. I wouldn’t have any problem with no more OS updates as long as app updates kept on coming. On top of that the OS is still very prone to crashing and I would consider Ubuntu Touch or Ubuntu phone OS to be very alpha in my eyes.
All things considered I decided to flash Flyme OS (Android) onto my phone by following the instructions here. Just remember fastboot requires sudo in front of the commands. It was very easy and very worthwhile. I now have an OS that I feel matches the quality of the hardware. Before I felt always limited by the OS and the drawbacks of it.
Eg.
- I tried to Bluetooth transfer a photo while on holidays and could not.
- Replying to comments on the Facebook webapp no longer works!
- No decent app for FB messenger that scales to the phone properly.
- Crash, restart, crash… repeat.
- Audio bug that can’t be fixed.
Overall I made the right choice here. My phone feels wonderful to use now and doesn’t crash. Its a truly rich experience in comparison. Ubuntu phone may have been cool for vendors to sell more of their units and for Canonical to get feedback on their OS but really that is all it was. A developer feedback program. There is no way I could recommend Ubuntu phone OS as an actual consumer option on their phone right now.