Canonical will stop developing Unity, Mir and Ubuntu Phone

Well, the next big news about Ubuntu is behind my authorship, but the reason is very sad this time: Canonical throws the development of Ubuntu Phone, as well as the Mir display server and the Unity shell (7 and 8 versions). The interest in ubuntuphone faded away more or less smoothly, the closure of the project is not such a surprise, but the decision regarding Unity is a complete shock. In version 18.04, it is planned to return to Gnome again. In other words, the company refuses the idea of ​​“convergence” (convergence) of the user interface on devices of various form factors. Under the cut a bit of my thoughts on the topic.

I to some extent participate in the development of Ubuntu Phone almost from the first day after the official announcement. I will not retell the news in Russian, please refer to the original sources (links in the basement of the news). In short - Mark Shuttleworth Shuttleworth decided that for Canonical now more important than IoT and OpenStack, and Ubuntu Phone and Unity, in his opinion, resulted only in a split of the community and misunderstanding. In contrast to the retelling, I would like to share thoughts on this matter. First, there is the fact that now there are no companies that could afford to create a completely free mobile operating system. We are dreaming - if the project began in ~ 2008 and without a competitor in the face of Android, then surely everything would have gone otherwise. And in 2012 it was too late to catch up with Android. Probably, all this time I wanted to believe that everything was not so, and therefore I participated in the development of basic applications in OpenSource, communicated in the mailing lists, fixed bugs.

Yes, there was a feeling that there were problems somewhere (for example, the developers of the environment and applications did not have enough experience with QML, and the project management was rather lazy and passive), but it was believed that this was temporary. Or maybe I was just not so pragmatic at that time, I didn’t have enough experience to critically evaluate the whole process. Secondly, Canonical once again comes on the principle of "first marketing, then the product." Both Unity and Ubuntuphone were actively advertised, occupied honorary stands at exhibitions, and in fact were not ready for the end user. And now they will never be ready, unless the community picks up the development, which I hardly believe in. And people are once again deceived. Unjustified expectations are unpleasant things, very demotivating. How it will affect the attitude towards Ubuntu and Canonical in general is an open question. Thirdly, what do we now have as an alternative to two big guys in the world of mobile OS? Only Sailfish? Perhaps it is worth helping the project before it's too late? :)
')
PS Of course, I am grateful to this project, because literally grew on it, it was the first experience of OpenSource development, and I joined it as a student. So many interesting acquaintances, great memories and fun minutes! It is a pity that everything ends there. But on the ashes of the old there is always something new. What exactly - be sure to see soon!

UPD:
Adds the Robotex browser :
Ubuntu Phone development will continue UBPorts: https://blog.ubports.com/2017/04/08/ubports-community-qa.html
The development of Unity8 (in plans, the rejection of Mir in favor of Wayland) will be continued yunit: https://yunit.io/

Related Links:

→ Ubuntu 18.04 To Ship with GNOME Desktop, Not Unity
→ Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, rather than Phone and convergence