As you may know, Canonical has been maintaining the development of Ubuntu Touch on two separate branches, the Ubuntu RTM (release to manufacturer) branch containing the stable versions of the OS and the ubuntu-devel branch, where the new features were first implemented, before they get promoted to the other branch.

Recently, Canonical has split the Ubuntu RTM branch into two branches, one channel being for the BQ phoneand ther other one for the Meizu one. This is a good thing for the developers that create optimizations for one Ubuntu phone only (e.g. tweaks for Meizu that are not needed on Bq, or vice versa).

But there is a problem with this, and Canonical is already creating a fix for it:

For now, the Ubuntu Touch users cannot switch from a development branch to another via an OTA (over the air) method, and that is inconvenient. If you are using the devel branch and want to move to the stable one, you need to flash your Ubuntu phone with the image you want to use.

Canonical is creating an official “switch path”, to permit the users to change the Ubuntu Touch branch without flashing their device. This is what Łukasz ‘sil2100’ Zemczak said in the mailing lists:

“Today Steve started doing clean-up in our ubuntu-touch channels. As per the new spec, the main change is that we will no longer provide per-ubuntu-series image channels. We need to have the flexibility of changing the underlying system seamlessly, without users having to switch to a different channel after a selected series is released. Once this is done, we will provide an useful list of all officially available channels with their descriptions,”