Simon Raffeiner stopped working with the project in mid-2016, about 10 months before Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth announced that development of the phone and the tablet were being stopped.
He said he had started working on Click apps in December 2014, began writing the 15-part “Hacking Ubuntu Touch” blog about system internals in January 2015, became an Ubuntu Phone Insider, got a Meizu MX4 from Canonical, and worked on bug reports and apps until about April 2016 when he sold off/converted all my remaining devices in mid-2016.
Raffeiner said that the decision to stop developing the Ubuntu Phone had been made around October 2016 but the public were only told about it in April 2017.
It didn’t target a profitable niche;He put the failure down to seven factors:
- The user experience was bad and priorities skewed;
- The devices were hard to get and didn’t deliver;
- Communication and marketing were rather chaotic and sometimes misleading;
- There was too much focus on technical features the users and app developers didn’t care about;
- The life of an app developer was too hard; and
- It wasn’t as open and community-driven as intended.
