While some still believe that it will be impossible for a small team to keep the development of the Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch alive after Canonical's decision to abandon both projects, UBports founder Marius Gripsgård thinks different.

We reported the other day that the leader of the UBports community, a team of skilled developers porting Canonical's Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to various widely-used mobile devices, such as Fairphone 2 and OnePlus One, announced that he would do everything in his power to keep Unity 8 alive.

We promised to keep you guys updated with what happens at UBports, and Marius Gripsgård has just made a new announcement on his Google+ page that Unity 8 has a new home at https://unity.ubports.com, and new builds will be rolling out very soon, available at http://ci.ubports.com/job/unity8/.

"After the announcement that Canonical will stop investing in Unity8, we stepped forward stating that we will continue development for Unity8. The reason why we will do that is that we believe in convergence, we believe convergence is the thing people want in the future," reads the respective web page.

Fairphone 2, OnePlus One and Nexus 5 getting new Unity 8 images soon

If you're one of the lucky people to have a Fairphone 2, OnePlus One or Nexus 5 smartphone, we have some good news for you, as Marius Gripsgård says today that new (unstable) system-image builds with their Unity 8 clone are coming out in the next few days for those who want to install and test them on their devices.

As one might have expected, the development of the Unity 8 interface will take place on GitHub at https://github.com/ubports/unity8, and everyone is welcome to contribute. You can also join UBports' Telegram group at https://ubports.com/telegram if you're interested in the future of Unity 8 on mobile.