I’m very proud of what quite a number of teams achieved together last week. On Friday we announced the opening of the Ubuntu Touch software store. Just to quickly illustrate who was all responsible for this, here’s a list of the teams/projects involved:

  • Click itself - the format in which we ship apps.
  • Community team - helped with coordination of whole app story and project management.
  • Design team - putting together plans for how the experience should be.
  • *dations teams (Foundations, Phonedations), getting everything in the phone image, helping with the integration of the download service.
  • IS, setting up servers and help with deployment.
  • Online Services (Client) - writing the code for the whole app management experience on the client side.
  • Online Services (Server) - putting together the software store, review capabilities, etc.
  • SDK team - teaching QtCreator about Ubuntu apps and click packages.
  • Security team - defining and putting together our app confinement strategy.
  • Unity teams - integration of the app scope and other bits and pieces.
  • Lots of others (feedback, code review, encouragement, etc).

I’m sure I forgot to mention a team or two, but it’s at least worth trying to point out who all was responsible for this. The security confinement, the SDK and Unity have obviously been under heavy development for a longer time already, some plans existed before, but the vast majority of what you can see now was planned three months ago. So with this in mind, I feel everybody involved in this project deserves a big hug and some words of praise. This is a great achievement.

There are definitely a bunch of things still left to be done, but now we have:

  • a good app development experience,
  • a software store you can easily submit apps to,
  • a mobile OS where you can easily install apps.

Go (virtual) team! :-D

This project was my first try at project managing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hundreds of emails, lots of meetings and discussions on IRC made the software store a reality. Everybody worked very hard to bring this to fruition and it was a fantastic feeling to be able to download some new apps on my Nexus 7 today.

As I said above: there is still quite a few things we’ve got to do, so the coming weeks are going to bring us a lot of great stuff: purchases, some automation of the app review, easy app updates, apps with compiled code and much much more. Stay tuned and keep publishing your great apps!

Big hugs to the extended team, you are all heroes and thanks for the great time with you!