Ubuntu Touch

Updated: December 12, 2025

I recently installed UT (Ubuntu Touch) on a Google Pixel 3a. Installation was fairly straightforward despite not having flashed smartphones before. The user interface is reasonably intuitive. It makes and receives phone calls and makes and receives text messages, however I'm unable to send or receive images over text. This may be an issue with Tello and MMS, and have nothing to do with UT. There's at least one TOTP app (Authenticator NG) available. It can browse the web (with Morph browser) and comes with typical apps like camera, photo viewer, weather, clock, messages, calculator, notes, and more.

It comes with a terminal and at a glance it appears that rsync is not available, but Syncthing is an alternative.

One potential advantage of postmarketOS over Ubuntu Touch is that postmarketOS appears to have better support for current releases on old devices. I recently installed UT 20.04 (which is old) on this Google Pixel 3a. About a month later one day when checking for updates from within the phone, one was available so I applied it. If I remember correctly, the update was around 112MB, which seems very small for an update moving two major revisions forward. After rebooting, the settings app shows the phone now running UT 24.04 (24.04-1.1). The Google Pixel 3a page still lists 20.04 as the current release for this device, at the time of this writing. I don't understand how this all works and I may be interepreting or remembering something incorrectly. That said, the update was as smooth as possible, and I must say that it downloaded faster than a similarly-sized update from Apple (a 4 trillion dollar company).

Apparently you can hook this up to a TV or screen.

I'm impressed! After this experience my interest in iOS has plummeted.

More info later.