UBports devs announced today on Twitter that Canonical sent them a few old Ubuntu Phone devices to continue the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

Now that Canonical has ceased the development of its revolutionary Unity 8 user interface for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used on smartphones from Meizu and BQ, the company decided to donate several devices to the UBports community.

UBports is recreating Ubuntu Touch, maintaining, updating, and modifying its code to offer the world a free and open source mobile operating system for those who want to use something else than Android, iOS, and what else is still out there.

The devices received by UBports are the BQ Aquaris E5 HD and Meizu MX4, but they appear to run Android instead of Ubuntu Touch, so we talked with project leader Marius Gripsgård, as well as his colleague Dalton Durst to find out more about the donation.

UBports plans to improve Ubuntu Touch for legacy Ubuntu Phones

UBports' Marius Gripsgård has confirmed for Softpedia that the devices are indeed using Android. He said that the team plans to reflash them and install their modified Ubuntu Touch version to continue to improve the mobile OS for those who still own them.

Canonical donated more than 20 a total of 38 old Ubuntu Phones to UBports (18xBQ Aquaris E5 HD and 20xMeizu MX4), according to Dalton Durst, which should be enough for them to improve the open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system for these legacy devices.

At the moment, UBports officially supports Ubuntu Touch OS on the Fairphone 2, Nexus 5, and OnePlus One smartphones, as well as on the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD tablet, but while the mobile OS might install on other devices, these aren't fully supported yet.

Among these, there are all the legacy Ubuntu Phones like BQ Aquaris E4.5, BQ Aquaris E5 HD, Meizu MX4, and Nexus 4. So with this donation from Canonical, at least we can hope that the Meizu MX4 and BQ Aquaris E5 HD will soon be officially supported.

Marius Gripsgård said he's really grateful for Canonical's donation and plans to focus his efforts on improving Ubuntu Touch for these legacy Ubuntu Phones, making a lot of users happy. Meanwhile, UBports is working hard to revive the Unity 8 interface.

If you want to install UBports' Ubuntu Touch OS on your Android smartphone or legacy Ubuntu Phone, you can always visit the project's website to check out the latest installation instructions on how to flash the Ubuntu mobile OS on your device, if it's supported.

Update 21/02/2018: We’ve updated the story with the correct information on the total number of devices received by UBports from Canonical.

Look at what we found in the mail today! #Ubuntu Legacy devices, fresh from the #Canonical vault. We are extremely happy that they gave us this gift. We are going to port, crack and flash the heck out of these devices. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/kK3qhYgx0j — UBports (@UBports) February 20, 2018