Shipping the First Ubuntu Touch Calculator

Hello,

The Calculator app is closing in on its first real release, and the last few weeks have been about closing out the high and critical bugs standing in the way. Nothing glamorous — crash bugs, layout issues, edge cases in the calculation engine — just the grind of getting something from “mostly works” to “ships.”

It’s the first time I’ve taken an open source project from active bug triage through to an actual release, working entirely in public on Launchpad, with review from people I’ve never met in person. Riccardo in Italy and Boiko, who’s deep in the telephony app, have both been steady presences in the channel the whole way through — feels less like a project now and more like a small, scattered team that just happens to talk mostly through a chat window.

Small thing in the scheme of the whole phone, but it’s teaching me how a real release actually gets made — not in one big push, but dozens of unremarkable merge proposals.