I tried daily driving Ubuntu Touch for 30 days

I Gave Ubuntu Touch 30 Days. It Lasted One.

I had a plan to run Ubuntu Touch on my Fairphone 5 for a full 30 days. I’d heard it runs great on that hardware, and to be fair, it does. The OS itself is smooth on the Fairphone. But, I cracked after a single day. Too many things that were core to how I actually use a phone were missing, broken, or just didn’t work at all.

WiFi wouldn’t connect or even find networks. GPS showed as “on” but never acquired a lock. I couldn’t get fingerprint scanning set up. And that’s what I ran into in just the first few hours.

Ubuntu Touch does let you run Waydroid to emulate Android and install Android apps, which is genuinely cool. But, without GPS or Bluetooth passthrough into that Android layer, my daily-driver apps for navigation and device syncing were completely unsupported. There was no workaround, because there was no viable native alternative on Ubuntu Touch either. Even the built-in web browser tripped me up — plenty of sites just didn’t function, because it doesn’t support newer CSS or JavaScript.

Here’s the breakdown, app by app.

Maps

Pure Maps looks promising on paper, but it’s not intuitive at all to use. Organic Maps, run through Waydroid, was a much easier experience. The catch: neither Organic Maps nor Pure Maps could actually get a GPS lock, which makes the “easier to use” win pretty hollow.

Web Browser

The built-in browser can’t even load Bluesky. It’s missing major functionality you’d expect from a modern browser, and plenty of sites just don’t work. When I tried to load Headspace, the hamburger menu wouldn’t even open.

Document Scanning

There’s a native option called Camera Scanner, but it isn’t great. I had better luck installing Fair Scan through Waydroid — that worked fine.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works on Ubuntu Touch itself, but Waydroid has no Bluetooth passthrough. If you were hoping to connect Bluetooth devices to your Android apps, that’s a dead end. This was a real deal-breaker for me — it meant I couldn’t use Gadgetbridge with my Garmin watch, and I couldn’t use the Oura app either.

Webber

This one’s a pleasant surprise. Webber adds an icon to the Ubuntu Touch dashboard that lets you install web apps so they behave like native apps — click the icon and the web app opens like it belongs on the device. It’s a neat trick, especially given how many “native” apps these days are really just a web page wrapped in an app shell.

Terminal

It’s Linux under the hood, but you can’t install all that much. Docker works, though — do you really need to run web servers out of your pocket? The terminal’s usefulness is pretty limited in practice. It could be handy for SSHing into other devices, but there are already good apps that do exactly that.

Final Thoughts

If you end up doing everything through Waydroid anyway, it kind of defeats the purpose — why bother? As a hobby project on a secondary phone, Ubuntu Touch is great fun. But I can’t see it functioning as a daily driver for anything beyond calls and texts. And if that’s genuinely all you need, it’s hard to justify spending 600 euros on a Fairphone just to put this on it.

On top of the missing functionality, the gestures are counterintuitive to everything we’ve been trained to expect from a modern touchscreen. It’s awkward to use, and I kept catching myself trying to navigate on Android muscle memory that simply didn’t translate.