It seems quite low I think. Part of the problem is that Android is just so ubiquitous. As the article mentions "Developing for Ubuntu Touch right now is not easy, mainly because of lack of documentation and examples". Android has a million examples, libraries, first and third party documentation, a load people at Google improving the tools all the time (though this churn can also be a bad thing of course...) Canonical has less of this and the development plan seems focused on Web apps.

Another problem is that there are no Ubuntu phones currently available to buy new. The Meizu mentioned in the article is no longer sold, and installing on semi-supported hardware is flakey. For example, you can buy a Meizu phone that has Android and reflash it with Ubuntu Touch, but then future OTA updates don't work and you have to reflash each time. Devices sold on ebay might not be the so-called "international version" and therefore have a locked bootloader, you don't know until you buy one.

The way updates are handled and the community support seem much more organised than with Firefox OS though. That was a complete disaster, with the first gen ZTE phones receiving no updates at all and even the Flame (a developer device) being pretty much abandoned right away. At least Canonical keep pushing OTAs for the official BQ and Meizu devices, and builds for Nexus devices are still produced so you can flash it on semi-common hardware if you're feeling brave.

I know it's easy to say and very difficult to do, but really what Canonical need is a phone that has some long-term availability. You often hear Alan Pope on podcasts use the excuse that it is not Canonical's problem that devices are not being sold, it is up to the manufacturers. But if there are no devices to buy then how is UT ever going to gain any real traction?

You can actually flash a Meizu and continue to get OTA updates now.

Not really meaningful for anyone wanting to make a living of selling his/her application developer skills.

Windows Phone with its meager market size has more than all 4+ places summed together.

That wasn't the question:

> What I really want to know is what the adoption rate of Ubuntu Touch is among the hacker/hobbyist/diehard Linux crowd.

It's not at all about selling one's services or gaining income from "apps". It's about gauging if there's enough (community) momentum that at least for this group of people, UT could turn out to be an interesting alternative.

Without developers willing to learn to code for the platform the community won't have any applications worth using.

I understand it's a circular problem- an app ecosystem cannot grow without developers, and devs want to invest only in ecosystems that have users. Or do they? I feel the thing about these alt-OSes is that without mainstream appeal, they need to go hard for the hacker/hobbyist/diehard minority, who are motivated by things other than the possibility of attracting mainstream customers. Ubuntu, as a Linux distro, already has that appeal- the trick is to expand that to mobile.

I am willing to bet it is almost zero. Android does the job for most people that crave modding-ability/customisation, so Ubuntu Touch is really only interesting for a very small niche.

Among the people i know who really care about open source and security, the max is running Android without the Google Services, but i have never seen Ubuntu Touch in the wild.

The problem is, even most apps from Google's competitors now won't run without Google Play Services. Android is becoming increasingly useless as an open source OS.

The diehard crowd and maybe with people that require better security might use it.

For everybody else, they OS is there only to support the applications they want to run. I'm a Linux fan, but there's no way I would be happy with it for my phone OS.

Im happy to mess around with ubuntu on a laptop because if a stuff it up completely its not hard to get a windows imgae and start again. This is not the case for mobiles or tables at the moment.

It's not that hard to flash a Custom ROM on most Android phones. I mean, it is a major pain in the butt, as you usually lose your warranty, you don't usually get the original ROM as you already hinted, and dual-booting is only possible on a handful of devices, but if you for example already have CyanogenMod flashed anyways, then the first two of those problems are already out of the way.