Considering Canonical has pulled resources from this project, the path for continued third-party development of Unity will not be easy. It is my hope that they are successful and can become another shining example of the power of forking, like the MATE project.

Ubuntu phones and laptops never became popular with hardware makers, carriers, or consumers, and software development seemed to be slowing down. While Unity 8 was shipping on phones and tablets, it has never been stable enough to become the default on the desktop, which uses Unity 7. Canonical's work on creating a new desktop display server, Mir, has also been slow.