Ever since we first announced Ubuntu for phones on January 2nd this year, a fantastic relationship with our friends in the [XDA community](https://www.xda-developers.com/) has formed. For quite some time now we have been releasing [daily images of Ubuntu for phones/tablets](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install) and our friends in the XDA community have been working to enable these images for a [wide range of devices](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices).
Much of this work has been happening on the [Ubuntu Touch XDA forums](https://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2068) which have seen **4600+** posts from this enthusiastic community.
I wanted to follow up on a few different XDA-related things that are going on.
## Participating in and Sponsoring xda:devcon
From 8-11 August in Miami, Florida will be [xda:devcon](https://xda-devcon.com/), the very first XDA developer conference. We are sponsoring the event and will be exhibiting there. We are delighted to be supporting such an awesome event. 🙂
I will also be speaking at the event and delivering a new presentation called [Building a Convergent Future With Ubuntu](https://xda-devcon.com/presentation/ubuntu-touch/) that will cover the vision and goals of Ubuntu on devices, how our community is right at the core of what we are doing (and accessible to everyone), and how far along we are in this vision.
[Michael Hall](https://mhall119.com/) will be running an app development workshop and showing attendees how to build an application from scratch that runs across Ubuntu phones, tablets, and desktops. More details on Michael’s workshop will be announced soon. Given that we are releasing the beta of our [Ubuntu SDK](https://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/) in July, this workshop will be a great opportunity to come and learn how to get started!
We will also be joining the main conference and happy to answer questions, demo Ubuntu on these different devices, and anything else. If you want to set up a meeting, please drop me an email.
## Weekly XDA Q&A
We want to ensure our friends in the XDA community have as much information at their fingertips about Ubuntu Touch. As such, [Daniel Holbach](https://daniel.holba.ch/blog/) is collating questions from the community (you can [ask your question here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1B2GzH5Zh8EVEXboe_5E2HuJgSmDpBqPXH59LM50376c/viewform)) and then posting a weekly summary of questions on [this XDA forum thread](https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2239338).
As ever, if anyone has any other questions, be sure to join my weekly live Ubuntu Q&A videocast. This week it will be happening at **6pm UTC** on **Wednesday 19th June** on [Ubuntu On Air](https://ubuntuonair.com/). Be sure to join me then!
## Making Porting Easier
One of the reasons I am so delighted to see the close relationship between Ubuntu and XDA continuing to form is that I feel making Ubuntu available on a range of different devices is a key part of what will help us to be successful.
Although we at Canonical a are currently targetting a very specific set of handsets for our first release of Ubuntu Touch (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4), the wider XDA community has been working to enable the image on other devices that Canonical is not directly focused on. This is an awesome contribution.
One of the technical challenges here is how we handle firmware and binary blobs to make various hardware components work. Unfortunately, some of this firmware cannot be legally re-distributed by us (although the user can typically download it directly).
I have asked Daniel Holbach to work with the phonedations team to ease this process as much as possible and some work is going into `phablet-flash` to make it easier to handle these firmware pieces. We should have more on this in the coming weeks.
## Onwards and Upwards!
There is lots of fantastic work going on and I am looking forward to continuing to work with the always excellent and approachable XDA community. We look forward to seeing you in Miami in August!
