Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Amrisha Prashar
on 29 May 2015

Phone updates: May


The full list of Ubuntu Phone updates from May are provided below.

Indicators

  • Icons are now all monochromatic
  • Web Browser

  • Bottom edge gesture to reveal tabs view
  • New settings UI with Privacy settings
  • Improved interaction and visuals of top sites
  • Improved scrolling smoothness and chrome interaction
  • Enhancements to search suggestions from url bar
  • Bottom edge gesture to exit fullscreen windows
  • Enhancements to the insecure websites visual feedback
  • Properly save and restore navigation state between runs
  • Honour Window.close() requests
  • Noticeable performance improvements in the generation of tab previews
  • Private browsing
  • Search suggestions in url bar

    Address Book

  • Import contacts from SIM
  • New settings panel
  • Improved first time user experience for contact sync/import

    Messaging app

  • Group chat support (late landing)

    Toolkit v1.3

  • Migrated to the 5.4 version of Qt (https://wiki.qt.io/New-Features-in-Qt-5.4)
  • Introduced 1.3 version of the Toolkit
  • Brand new ListItem with fancy features and high performance
  • Refactored UbuntuShape for better performance
  • New dedicated overlay shape. Made use of the new UbuntuShape architecture to create an extended shape with efficient overlay rendering
  • Improved alarm services
  • New text handler visuals and improved behaviour in text areas
  • Optimized Slider and ProgressBar components.
  • PageStack header animations for MainView 1.2
  • Refactored OrientationHelper
  • Simplify animation code and make it more robust

    Scopes

  • Scope tagging. With this, newly installed scopes will be automatically aggregated if their tags are matched by an aggregator
  • Today, Nearby and News scopes added support for keywords
  • New and improved layout for the News scope

    Qt 5.4

  • Introducing Qt WebSockets: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebsockets-index.html (requested by developers, now on vivid images)
  • Two new QML modules: Declarative State Machine, QML Models
  • OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1 support
  • Improved font rendering for many languages
  • QQuickRenderControl for efficient rendering into framebuffer objects
  • QStorageInfo
  • Lots of performance improvements and bugfixes

  • Related posts


    Isobel Kate Maxwell
    13 February 2026

    The foundations of software: open source libraries and their maintainers

    Community Article

    Open source libraries are repositories of code that developers can use and, depending on the license, contribute to, modify, and redistribute. Open source libraries are usually developed on a platform like GitHub, and distributed using package registries like PyPI for Python and npm for JavaScript. These repositories contain pre-written, ...


    Miguel Divo
    13 February 2026

    From inspiration to impact: design students from Regent’s University London explore open design for their dissertation projects

    Design Article

    Last year, we had the opportunity to speak at Regent’s UX Conference (Regent’s University London’s conference to showcase UX work by staff, students, and alumni), where we engaged with students to make them aware of open design and their ability to contribute design skills to open source projects. The talk sparked great discussion, and we ...


    Lidia Luna Puerta
    12 February 2026

    When an upstream change broke smartcard FIPS authentication – and how we fixed it

    Ubuntu Article

    This is the story of how Canonical’s Support team provided bug-fix support: we tracked down an upstream change in OpenSC that inadvertently broke FIPS compatibility, coordinated with upstream developers across distributions, and delivered both a hotfix and a proper universal solution. ...