Xenial development has still been moving ahead, despite our emphasis on Focal. MMS patches have finally been applied. Josele and Lionel Duboeuf are thanked for their work on that. This will allow operation of a download?re-download button when an MMS comes in. That was a complicated process to manage, involving many different components, which needed to operate together. There has been some work done on mediahub client. This is the main mechanism for video and audio playback. Alberto has changed the media client library for it so that it is fully implemented in Qt and C++. In the future it will allow for simultaneous playback of videos. An obvious application for that would be in Teleports, where in a channel containing a lot of videos, they could autoplay as you scroll. There are several more steps needed for implementation of a feature like that but what has been done provides the foundation.

Sensorfw for Android 9 has been included now. It now covers magnetometer and compass. It has already been established that it works with Waydroid. Microphone access has been incorporated into the browser. The permissions dialog has been implemented, allowing it to function.

Google accounts have been restored, allowing sync of contacts and calendar.

All of this stuff will be in OTA-21, which goes out for testing on 22 December.

Before moving on to 20.04 news there were some other updates. Our permissions system has had some problems with Halium and some work has been done on that. On Android 9 devices, the prompt to allow use of the camera was not working and now has been fixed. The fix can be ported back to 7.1 but porters will have to apply a kernel change. The camera will work in devices which don’t have the prompt but that is because of a workaround that allowed the camera without permission. That change needs a bit of tweaking and adaptation, so it will not make OTA-21.

Thanks to Guido we now have metapackages for 20.04. The importance of that is that it will make building UT images hugely less complicated. Work has been done on Messaging, Phone and Address Book core apps to update their legion of dependancies. A new version of ofonophoneSIM has been packaged. If you have a virtual build, this component will be able to send messages without the corresponding phone hardware. The ofono community made this new upgrade.