30 participants from Germany and abroad took the opportunity at the Volla Community Days in June to inform themselves about the status of the project and to contribute their ideas, 22 of them online. This means that the event had a total of three times as many participants as last year. This time the focus was on the Volla Phone, its user-friendliness and the protection of privacy.
Users, developers and partners discussed at the location of Hallo Welt Systeme and parallel in the
telegram chat of the Volla User Community and via video conference. The participants could try out Volla Phones with an early beta version of the Volla OS, Ubuntu Touch and a Sailfish OS Community Port.
Volla user experienceThis gave rise to good ideas for improving user-friendliness, such as dispensing with a special syntax for the springboard to provide suggestions for people or using vibration for the Volla shortcuts that users can invoke with a single gesture (touch, move and release).
To transfer the Volla user experience to the alternative, mobile Linux operating system Ubuntu Touch, one participant suggested using the fingerprint sensor to conveniently bring the Volla Springboard with the intelligent text field and shortcuts to the foreground at any time.

Volla project on schedule
The main lecture first presented the status of the Volla project. After the delivery of the second batch of the Volla phone by the manufacturer Gigaset, the devices can now be sent for beta testing to a group of selected supporters of the crowd funding campaigns. The development is therefore on schedule. Delivery of the first generation of the Volla phone will begin in October, initially to supporters of the Kickstarter campaign.
Privacy protectionThe second part of the presentation dealt with the continuous improvement of the protection of the users' privacy. The full OS without Google Apps and Play Services is just the beginning. Besides curated apps, an anonymous VPN without logging, the transparent control of network traffic was discussed, among other things, in order to block specific connections from apps or to services.
Extensive interviews with Robert Šmorhaj for
Hide.me and Jan Sprinz for the
Ubports Foundation gave participants the opportunity to gain insight into the respective activities of the partners. Hide.me can offer anonymity through its headquarters in Malaysia, because the laws there do not require logging of network activities, unlike in Europe or the USA. Thanks to the UBports Foundation and its community, Ubuntu Touch is developing into a real alternative for consumers who no longer want to depend on Google or Apple.
The German association
SUMA e. V. presented itself as a potential new partner, offering among other things the meta search engine MetaGer, which respects the privacy of users without compromise, and a map app. Search queries via the springboard on the Volla Phone could be redirected directly to MetaGer. It was discussed that users should have the choice. For this reason Startpage is a candidate for the search from the springboard.
Dual Boot for the Volla PhoneFrom the Hackathon, the developer "Luka" developed a concept for the possibility to install two different operating systems on the Volla Phone and to start them alternatively. A security concept could be implemented that uses the Linux distribution Talis among others: With each start the operating system is started like the first time without any data traces or any changes caused by a hacker attack.
The Volla team thanks all participants and is already looking forward to the Volla Community Days 2021. More information about this year's event can be found in the local press:
Tags: Volla OS,Volla Phone,Ubuntu Touch,Privacy,Beta
