Is 2026 the year of Linux on your phone screen? No, not really, but let’s explore Ubuntu Touch anyway.
I picked up this OnePlus 6T a while ago as a temporary backup phone when my original Google Fold had to go in for repair, and its primary function since then has been a dust gatherer.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see if we can’t squeeze Linux onto this device, and figure out if it’s worth the effort.
The OnePlus 6T dropped at the tail end of 2018, and was OnePlus’s flagship device, back when flagship phones had an RRP of £500. Different times indeed, with OnePlus having lost mind and market share since then, and it looks likely that they are now withdrawing from all but their domestic Chinese market. Sad times for a once innovative and exciting company.
But we’re not here for a OnePlus retrospective, or for a full review of a phone that’s knocking on the door of being a decade old. It was, however, fairly well regarded at the time, with the most common knocks on it being its entry into the vanguard of “courageous” phones with no microSD expansion or headphone socket. This is a stupidity I remain salty about this to this very day. I bought this slightly battered example for £45 back in January 2025.
The hardware was great for the time, with a still pretty solid 6.4-inch high resolution AMOLED screen and a Snapdragon 845 processor, beefy in 2018, but of course the question today is whether it has sufficient beef or protein alternative of your choice for Ubuntu Touch.
But what is an Ubuntu Touch, and why is it, and how is it, and who is it, and where is it? Well, to answer the last question first, it lives at ubuntu-ports.com, which will do a better job of answering the rest of the questions than I will, but the URL itself provides something of an answer on what it is. It is a port of Ubuntu to mobile phone hardware, which needs optimised for touch. Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
The why of it is much less neat an answer, but if you are looking to keep your data to yourself, rather than on Google or Apple’s servers, and reduce or remove your dependence on cloud services, well, Ubuntu Touch is the maximalist if perhaps not pragmatic answer. I want to see if the system is fit for modern use, even on decidedly non-modern hardware, but first we’ll actually have to install the bloody thing.
Some cursory Googling reveals it’s highly recommended to install from a base of Android 9. Wow. Single digits, huh. I remember those times. I am old. It is currently on Android 11, which is also old, but insufficiently old. So, we’ll start by downgrading the operating system which will require us to unlock the bootloader, which is a sentence that has already scared off any normal person from trying this. Onwards, fellow weirdos and oddballs.
Now, the first draft of the script here recounted a week and a bit of struggles following dead links and halfway outdated guides, which brought me to the brink of an aneurism. I don’t believe in hiding my troubles, mistakes and outright failures on this channel, but seeing as I’m not intending on this being a detailed how to guide, and it didn’t make for thrilling audiovisual entertainment, here’s the short version. Well, short-ish.
Install the OnePlus drivers and Google’s ADB tools, and also the Qualcomm chipset drivers so we can talk to the phone. I needed to plug the phone in through a USB hub for it to be recognised, absolutely insanely. Unlock the bootloader by enabling that ability in the Developer options, and rebooting into the Fastboot environment to unlock it.
Turn the phone off completely, hold both volume buttons down and plug it into the computer which lets the MSM Download Tool blast Android 9 back on to it,. Most guides say to hold power and volume up, I’m pretty sure this is wrong. Go through the basic setup again to switch adb debugging and bootloader unlocking back on, unlock the bootloader again, and finally use not the current version, but an old version 0.8.9 of the ubports installer to install the stable branch of Ubuntu Touch 20.04. Phew. I’ve never been so grateful to see a successful boot.
This has been the most frustrating thing I’ve done on this channel by some distance, and if you weren’t scared off from doing it before, I expect you are now. Let’s see it was actually worth the headache, although I will say that now I know what needs to be done and how to do it, it would take less than half an hour to repeat. This device was dropped from the top tier of support for the newest 24.04 release back in July, so that’s why I’m starting on the older 20.04 version. I’ll come back to that later.
After the usual setup routine including a few prompts on how it handles gestures, we’re left on this user interface, showing off a pretty minimal set of preinstalled apps.
The most obvious difference between the now broadly similar Android and IOS defaults is the application dock up the left side of the screen, and let’s call it the Ubuntu button at the bottom left which brings up a sheet of all installed applications.
Navigating the interface is pretty intuitive, while feeling distinct from iOS and Android.
When in an app, swiping right a little brings the dock back up to load recent or pinned apps, and swiping a little more brings up the full app list.
We can also swipe left to quickly switch to the last used app, or swipe and hold briefly to get a fuller multitasking/switcher view, and a swipe up from here quits the app.
Long pressing a dock icon lets you pin or unpin them from the dock, or quit the app.
As is now standard, pulling down from the top of the screen brings us to the notifications and quick settings panel. All in, pretty easy to use and get used to. All of the phone hardware appears to be working, pretty much. The GPS takes a bit longer to initially lock on, and there’s certainly device specific optimisations that could be made given infinite resources. For example this loses about 25% of battery life sat at idle overnight, which isn’t great.
However, what I’m most interested in is seeing how close this can come to being a full replacement for iOS or Android. Ubuntu Touch does have a party trick where it can run Android apps with some limitations, which we’ll get to, but let’s see what the native apps can do first.
As I say it’s a pretty minimal amount of apps out of the box, and I’m not sure there’s much mileage in going through absolutely all of them – for example, this is a perfectly cromulent calculator, but there’s not much more to say about it, same with the basic weather app.
The most notable thing about using them is that almost none of it is tied into a wider ecosystem or subscription. So this Calendar app lets you add in your appointments, but it’s not pulling down anything from iCloud or Google. Depending on your view, that’s either liberating, or a massive inconvenience.
Same with the music and media player apps, they’ll play what you have downloaded to the phone without issue, but they’re not offering to start streaming anything.
In fact I think it’s only the Notes app that offers some internet sync features, with Evernote in this instance. So the photos you take are stored locally and can be viewed in the Gallery, but not uploaded to anyone’s cloud automatically. So we’re trading off data control and privacy for convenience, and how much each of those is worth to you will really determine how much value there is in this sort of exercise.
It’s obviously not disconnected to the internet, so you can access internet services on your terms. There’s a capable Chromium based web browser called Morph supplied. The downside is that this app which is doing an awful lot of the heavy lifting in making Ubuntu Touch usable is based on Chromium 87. That’s from November 2020. We have all passed a lot of water under the bridge since then, and it’s creaking under the strain of some modern websites.
We do have an app store installed, but in terms of alternative browsers there’s not really a viable alternative that’s either newer, stable, or feature complete.
Indeed, while there’s more apps available than I expected, a really high percentage of them are basically just web shortcuts to various services, such as your social networks. There’s a few that looked quite promising, but ultimately fell a bit short.
This is the Sturm eBook reader, which is displaying eBooks happily enough, but I can’t change the size of the font, and I’m too short sighted to deal with this.
There’s this Translate app, which says it’s a native app but just gives a suspiciously web-like 500 error when asked to translate anything so that’s no use.
This podcast app, Podphoenix is a bit laggy, and while it’s doing the basics of downloading and playing podcasts fine, its not able to play them at 2x speed so it’s a swing and a miss for me.
It’s not all bad news, though.
UAdBlockNG is a system wide ad blocker, which makes web browsing a lot more responsive.
Pure Maps is maybe a little bit clunky but does what it says on the tin, which is quite impressive given the resources Google and Apple maps took to build out.
Radio is an internet radio stream player that has little in the way for thrills but works well.
Gear System emulates Sega Master System and Game Gear games well enough, and there’s also emulators for GameBoy, NES, and QVBAM for GameBoy Advance.
InstantPho is a pretty useful tool for cropping, rotating, light editing and applying filters to images, which reminds me of Snapseed and I like it quite a bit. It’s not the most comprehensive mobile photo editing app there’s ever been, but it’s doing pretty much all I would ever need on a phone. For my money the most impressive app we’ll speak about today.
A low bar, but Solitaire plays solitaire without plastering ads everywhere, which can’t be taken for granted. Other relatively simple native games are available, but nothing like the spread available on Android.
For eMail there’s Dekko 2, oddly named, but performs the client basics of emailing well enough.
It’s unfashionable, but we should consider Tradphone activities, like calling and messaging. Normal mobile calls and SMS messaging work just fine, so the absolute basics are covered. There’s more limited support for the rest of the messaging apps. There is a native Telegram app, Teleports, but for the most part we’ll have to rely on their web versions, if they have them. And we’ll be saying this for an awful lot of use cases.
How practical this is depends on how well the sites have decided to optimise for mobile browsing, which they 100% should be doing, as opposed to trying to push you into an app for a quote unquote better experience, which typically means to better harvest and resell your data.
In theory, given how many apps are really just websites in an app overcoat, there ought to be very few barriers. All social media apps, for example, are just websites, like Facebook and X and whatnot, as are dating platforms, ride sharing apps like Uber, shopping sites like Amazon, and video platforms like YouTube and Netflix. None of these ever needed apps to work, so as long as they still maintain their web presence we can generally use them, albeit somewhat clunkily.
Health & Fitness, data tracking and smartwatch integration is a weak spot, maybe intentionally given the ethos of the OS, but if you’re into that this isn’t the OS for you. There’s also no obvious way to get mobile payment services up and running, so no Google and Apple Pay for us here. Just Sellotape your bank card to the back of your phone, job done.
Another weak spot is the modern world’s insistence on using your phone as a the source of all authorisation. There’s some solutions for this in Ubuntu Touch such as multi-factor authorisation app 2FA Manager, which seems to do that job just fine.
However banking apps are traditionally the one area where there’s very few avenues to work around. Depending on which bank you are with, there’s probably a web interface to do a lot of the balance checking and payments and so on, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to approve payments or set up new payees without verifying your identity in an app, which the OS doesn’t have. That’s if the browser can load it, mine doesn’t load at all.
So, here’s where we return to that Android app capability. In boffin speak, Waydroid lets us run a full Android operating system on Linux using lightweight containers rather than traditional emulation. This can give Android apps near-native performance, and better integration with the native OS. For us goombas in userland, what that boils down to is an app that’s basically opening an Android phone environment on your Ubuntu phone, although you can also open any installed apps straight from the app sheet homescreen.
Where this works really well is if the app is open source, so for example we can install the F-Droid app store and through that have another world of options to explore, such as my usual podcast app Antennapod which has the features that Podphoenix lacks. There’s also the Firefox-based Fennec browser, completely up to date and which can open up my online banking.
Installing does require a bit of command line jiggery pokery, but if you’ve got this far that’s hardly likely to phase you. While I understand it’s technically possible to bodge the full Google Play store on the device, it tends to break things so I’ve not tried it, and, well, by that point we’ve kind of lost the point of De-Googling a device.
Even if you do, most banking and DRM-protected apps that rely on Google Play Integrity or SafetyNet checks won’t work. We can try finding the APK file for the app on the random internet APK archive sites if you want to, and maybe I’ll take the risk for something like this hooky copy of Balatro, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to trust my banking details to a randomly sourced app. I mean, it’s not like I have any money to steal, but it’s the principle of the thing.
I think this isn’t necessarily the nail in the coffin, for me at least, as it would still be possible to approve transactions and the like the old-school way of using a card reader, but it’s at least a million times less convenient.
I suppose, ultimately, that’s the take away. It’s possible to untangle all these digital tendrils that are wrapped around our necks, but it’s astonishingly inconvenient to do it. While I’m convinced the app-ification of everything was an error and we should just use websites, that ship has long since sailed.
While the ability to use a fair amount of Android apps goes a long way to close the app gap, it does rather prompt the question of why then choose Ubuntu Touch, rather than a De-Googled Android distribution such as GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, or LineageOS? Simliar concepts, but fewer drawbacks.
There is one app install avenue I’ve not touched on, in that standard Ubuntu apps can often install on the phone, if they support the mobile phone CPU’s ARM architecture, but as they expect a mouse and keyboard to control them, they’re generally unusable in any practical sense on a small touchscreen.
This does however bring to mind the dreams of the long departed Windows Phone 10, where the device in your pocket could plug into a dock and take on all the duties of a main PC, an idea perhaps most fully explored in the modern era by Samsung’s Dex mode. Of course, as this device doesn’t have display out capability, that’s not tenable here.
I fear we may be heading towards a future where the phone in your pocket is the only device you have, not through choice, but because phones are getting ever more expensive and computer hardware is more expensive still, so having both would be a pipedream for all but the ultra-rich.
As I get older, I try to actively push back against the comforting feeling that memories of the past are more appealing than dreams of the future, but the state of mobile phones depresses me, both in hardware terms where it stopped being interesting the best part of a decade ago, foldables aside, maybe, and in software terms, iOS and Android these days having converged to the point of feeling nearly identical, and increasingly locked down with no experimentation, or at least none filtering down to users.
It’s not that far back when we had not just Windows Phone as an alternative vision on how phones could work, but Nokia’s Symbian, Palm’s WebOS, even Firefox OS, and having used all of them and now including Ubuntu Touch, you can see elements of all them that wound up influencing and filtering into the current duopoly’s paradigms. How much better could these interaction models be if all of these OSes were able to innovate and iterate at the same time? We’ll never know, sadly, but a boy can dream.
For completeness sake, having got the experience and footage needed for this video I pulled the trigger on upgrading to the newer 24.04 version of Ubuntu Touch, and it went poorly. Rather naively, I simply upgraded from the settings screen which appeared to work, but has rather confused the bootloader and it no longer boots up.
I’m sure that’s fixable, but from looking at the release notes it has some under the hood improvements, but ultimately there’s nothing that helps the primary issues with the OS, which is nothing to do with the operation of the hardware, but the lack of a software ecosystem to let the phone thrive.
So, what have we learned here? Perhaps nothing that wasn’t obvious – if you were thinking about installing Ubuntu Touch on your only mobile device as the only operating system, I’d advise against it. I just can’t see it being practical. If you just want to tinker and explore, sure, go ahead. I’ve seen this phone go for as low as £30 recently, and it’s provided at least that much value in both frustration, entertainment, and education. Or “frustraintion”, if you will.
I think that’s as much as there is to explore in this realm, but if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.