The demise of UbuntuTouch was expected. There had been rumors to that effect. They tried to make it mainstream for very understandable commercial reasons, supporting Gmail and Facebook and stuff like that, but I think Canonical critically underestimated the Free Software developer community upon which their edifice depended. I would have been much more enthusiastic about UbuntuTouch, and possibly done development for it, if it had supported free software network services instead of proprietary stuff which I either dislike or don't care about.