Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
Look at the AdBlocker crackdown of Google Chrome. Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it, because it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser that Google spends >$1B/year to develop.
Same story for /e/ and GrapheneOS, the day Google pulls the plug on source code releases, god knows how long they will last. We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
>Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing. Running Ubuntu Touch isn't a viable option. Neither is postmarket, librem, tizen, they're all terrible. Security wise, for something as critically important in our lives as a smartphone, I am also not trusting any new pet project that won't be stable for 10 years.
Sure, you might be a poweruser that doesn't care about your phone burning its battery in your pocket after 1 hour because you know how to SSH on it from your watch and put it in sleep, but that's not a viable option. Leaving Android is suicide. A large part of its critical underpinnings are already into the kernel anyways, just disabled. (although a distro running binder could be a fun project). APIs are reverse engineerable generally speaking, except for the server part of play services. But then, if your issue is "my bank won't let me access their app without play services attesting me", I have great news, you won't even have an app for it on your new OS anyways, so it will not work by default. There's already not enough people working on GrapheneOS _or_ on mainstream linux OSes, what makes you think the sitation won't be ten times worse for your custom made mobile OS ?
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
Android is one, and that can never be taken away. Google pulls the plug ? cool, you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community. Hell, for all the shit that Google is doing, they're still constrained by having to work with other vendors: the system privileged notification receiver is swappable at build time, the recent app signing/verification system also is, because Samsung wouldn't let them control it all.
I do agree, mobile OSS OSes are rough. My point is that we should help them instead of helping Google's toxic relationship. It happened with Chrome/Blink, and everyone already forgot that lesson.
About hard-forking Android, no one was brave enough (pun intended) to do that for Chrome, considering the insane complexity and engineering costs (>$1B/y). (Only Apple was able to affort it with Webkit/Safari, but they are in the ad business too.)
I kinda dont see how both of you cant be right. We need a mobile OS that google isnt involved in. Why not use pure open source android to do it. It can only be cheaper than making it from scratch, since it has alot of work already done on it
Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.
> Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
And yet the GrapheneOS devs seem to be managing just fine.
> But I agree that it is a significant endeavor.
Yes, in fact it is orders of magnitude more significant an endeavor that just building upon and improving the existing AOSP stack.
I still use Konqueror occasionally. It no longer uses KHTML (it uses blink now iirc through Qt webengine (which just got webextension support, someone's working on adding them to falkon so I'm sure Konqueror isn't too far behind)) but it works surprisingly well. It's still a great file manager if any of you remember how good it was
The whole notion of smartphones is designed for intrusive user surveillance, from the regulatory side to the hardware itself to the software designed for it.
We need tablet computers that don't have hostile hardware like cameras and mics and sensor suites that can be remotely controlled, under proprietary firmware, completely out of owner control.
We need radio hardware and software that is entirely under owner control, with protocols and standards based connection controls; the notion that spectrum and cellular make network connectivity magically necessary to put under the draconian gatekeeping and surveillance of cellular carriers is flaming dumpster garbage.
The carriers are a primary threat vector. The hardware is a primary threat vector. The software is a primary threat vector.
There is absolutely no way to fix the current cellular phone security status quo, every single facet is designed to be leaky and allow "good guys" backdoored access "for the right reasons" and so on, whether it's "user experience telemetry" or "we have a warrant".
Running bog standard linux with sensible security defaults and a good softphone over an internet connection would be fine. There's nothing magical about phones or UX or wtfever this month's marketing rationalization is.
Handheld tablet computers with optional hardware, or even modular hardware, are going to be the future. The current paradigm of parasitic cellular carriers, invasive governmental regulatory bodies working on behalf of all sorts of corrupt interests, and complicit hardware manufacturers are 100% all in on milking consumers for every last unearned penny or intercepted PII they can get their grubby hands on.
Fundamentally, not enough. Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device. Firejail is a good start, but proper user isolation as Android does is the right solution (each app is a different user, and accessing their data/user data is only done through Providers, or IPC), and anything else is naively trusting and not enough, no matter how many layers of sandboxing and suid-ing you do. Doubly so when all of its apps are written in C++. Can't wait to deal with use-after-free on my mobile device.
In addition, its compatibility with android apps is also chains: why would I bother developing for sailfish (especially since it involves Qt / Qt Creator) when I can just develop an Android app, and say it'll run well enough (unless it needs play integrity, which is the same problem, or somehow falls behind in android/androidx compatibility)
> Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device.
Linux has SELinux as a default option which Android makes good use of, some forks more than others, and setup correctly it is better than user isolation. You could also recreate the protection user isolation provides through policy alone.
It is _the_ 2FA device. from SMS, to authenticators, to password managers, etc. It also has access to all of your personal information, your pictures, your contacts, your email. It actively receives notifications and messages from the outside world, from potentially any sender. It's connected through WiFi, GPS, 5G, bluetooth, UWB, every possible connection system imaginable. It can listen to your phone calls, read your text messages, interact on your behalf with pretty much everything in your life, and is a single facial recognition away from automating emptying your bank account. Not to mention the fact that mobile software does tend to want to at least survive a little bit when offline, so plenty of data is stored locally.
It's a key to your life. The perfect target for any attacker.
Because regular users (non-techies) install all kinds of apps on their phones, from all kinds of sources/vendors, but not on their desktop. Most people use only a handful of applications on their desktop (browser, office suite, …) but they have dozens if not hundreds of different apps on their phone.
> you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community.
It's far ahead, but at the same time, I think we shouldn't over-emphasise how much. Functionality at the beginning of a project's lifetime is way more important than incremental improvements (or just changes) made later, and thus while much more effort has been invested into Android, new projects primarily need to catch up when it comes to e.g. phone call support and stability, and won't have to redo a lot of the effort of e.g. implementing Material You 3 or whatever.
Which is to say that we're still years out from a viable competitor, but at the same time, there could be one five years from now, which is also not that long.
Material 3 is mostly not part of the AOSP tree (aside from some very, very deep code like shadows) and is just UI libraries. I actually wonder if M3 has View implementations, or if everything has been migrated to Compose.
You're also underestimating the amount of fundamental work that goes in Android. The vast majority is hardware integration. It's not all fancy little bells and whistles. It would have the added benefit of not having to relearn the security mistakes like LIST_ALL_PACKAGES or READ_SMS permissions being open to all, at least.
This is the sad part. I've resisted that slippery slope as much as possible. In part because of ideological reasons, and in part for usability reasons. I have large hands and poor eyesight - using a phone for non-trivial tasks is tedious. I think the only thing I encounter from time to time that requires a smartphone is paying for parking. Everything else I do from a desktop, or don't do at all (doom-scrolling etc.)
I wish society would resist the smartphonification of everything for no reason. A lot of it is marketing- and surveillance-driven.
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones compared to the developing resources available.
> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it
That's just wrong, there are other forks that still support MV2 extensions right now, and at least brave has no plans of shutting down MV2 extensions even after Google removes MV2 from upstream completely. It will certainly add maintance effort on brave's side, but they already patch a million other things that upstream doesn't support.
Brave said they'll try to maintain temporarily limited MV2 support for only 4 specific extensions, but recommend Brave Shields as the go-to adblocker for the future. Google is about to remove most of the MV2 code from the codebase, which will explode the complexity soon.
The word "temporarily" isn't mentioned anywhere on that page, and that's already a very different claim to "Brave is about to shut down MV2". And the MV2 support is not specific to those 4 extensions, the hosting on Brave's servers is (though for other extensions not that much changes with MV3 anyway).
MV2 is behind a flag for now, but it is about to be removed from the Chrome codebase entirely. Which is why Brave recommends using Brave Shields as the long-term solution, which does not depend on it.
> Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system?
The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years, and will likely fall 100x further. So actually, yes, thanks to AI it probably actually is reasonable to launch a fully new stack from scratch.
>The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years
Maybe, but the cost of actually shipping a product has fallen by maybe 10%. I don't see dozens of production ready mainstream OSes and web browsers popping up because LLM can dump tens of lines of code per second.
As a startup founder shipping product, I strongly disagree with that.
Give it 12 months, you will see dozens of from-scratch large scale software projects shipping. New web browsers, new operating systems, new gaming engines, new productivity software, we are at the threshold of having an abundance of software that was previously only available from large corporations.
> Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones compared to the developing resources available.
Multiple open source desktop/laptop operating systems are maintained.
I appreciate that there are people out there working on stuff like /e/OS, but the number one question I have when I learn about a mobile OS that isn't iOS or "Googled" Android is: will the banking and payment apps I need to operate in the modern world run on this OS?
A lot of people don't think this way because they haven't had any problems. But then one day it happens to you and you realize, ok, this is the one thing that matters - you're in a cashless store and the only way you can pay for your meal is to use Approved Apple or Approved Google operating systems.
Where I live, the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
To their credit Graphene maintains a global database of which of these apps work and don't. They're the only ones I know of so a thousand upvotes to Graphene OS.
But for my banks, the records in that database are grim. They won't run on Graphene, and they don't respond to reports about it.
One of my banks just discontinued its web UI because "people don't use it anymore, they use the app only."
This is how they're going to get us, folks. This is how we're going to lose it all. Writing code alone will not solve this. It will require some kind of collective action to defend our liberties. Some parts of the world are already lost. So this situation will likely come to a jurisdiction near you eventually: to make a transaction you will need permission from Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, or it won't happen. Then that four company list will start to shrink.
> the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
These are self-inflicted problems by these apps. Nothing to do with the OS. These apps simply don't work. Complain to the companies that push these broken apps to you.
Would you buy a microwave oven that kills itself if you play the wrong kind of music in your kitchen?
The problems may be inflicted by these apps but the reality is that in many cases you're stuck with them. Electric company freezes your account if you enable USB debugging? Well, you can't choose a new electric company. We can complain to these vendors all we want but they just ignore us.
So these problems become problems of the OS, not because the OS has a problem, but because it affects the reality of using the OS.
Is it such a burden to write them a letter stating, "Because you have decided to disable my electronic access, I am notifying you that I withdraw my consent to e-delivery. Please provide me statements and directions to mail you a check for payment." Maybe spend 20-30 min to find the specific laws that give you the right to do that and remind them of their timelines to comply.
Send a letter like that certified. It gets attention, and the time to write and mail a check really isn't, if you batch your bills, more than using an app.
We do have ways to push their inconvenience back on them.
It is great that you have the right in your jurisdiction to do that. Where I am, they just shut off your power if you don't pay.
It's a big and hairy world out there. Having lived on three continents and traveled to some pretty wild places, I always get a kick out of seeing which rights people have and assume that the rest of the world also has.
Not everyone has the time and resources to battle their utilities and bank(s). I know it’s important and sustained effort is necessary even if it’s hard, but we are talking about massive populations here and most people simply can’t or won’t fight that battle on their own. Organizing a large pushback is also a huge effort. And at the end of the day, there is an easy solution for folks: buy a “proper” smart phone that “just works” because it solves the problem now.
We’ve gotten to the point where unfortunately it is a luxury to fight for your privacy and consumer rights.
It obviously depends on where you live. In my country you certainly con choose a new electric company. I mention that because we really should use consumer choice to overcome these types of problems where we can. Ie if you can switch to a bank/electricity provider/whatever that has a less terrible app it’s really good to do so.
You’re implying we have more choice than we do and asking “the average joe” to change banks to accommodate their smartphone is not a serious suggestion.
My utility company, for instance, literally won’t let you navigate their site with a VPN running. These kinds of practices are commonplace and becoming standard.
I promise your electric company accepts payments outside of an app on your phone. I further promise that other banks are available that don't have terrible apps. These problems are way more surmountable than you're painting them here.
The alternative they accept is traveling down to their office and handing them cash, no joke. Phone app or cash. No website, never has been one. No snail mail because they "modernized" and discontinued it some time ago.
But I'm OK because one of my banking apps has some method of reading my contract number from the disabled electricity company app, and telling me how much I should pay and then it fires off a payment to them. Even though I can no longer use the electricity app directly because I enabled USB debugging once, the banking app is somehow still able to pick up this info from it.
Of course, said banking app refuses to run on Graphene or any of these other Google Play-less OSes, and the bank doesn't respond to inquiries about that issue, multiple people have tried.
The other bank I use does respond, and says they'll never run on "alternative OSes" because "alternative OSes are too insecure." They don't respond to followups.
I'm just saying man. A lot of people think this stuff is trivially solved because there is an option available to them in their home country. You don't know how big and nuts this world of 8 billion people and 200 countries is. This stuff varies beyond imagination, sometimes for the much worse.
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.
Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).
Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.
Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).
Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.
* Most of the personnel involved in developing web technologies are engineers, but they also include product managers, sales, marketing, legal, customer support, and other functions.
* Given the complexity of Chrome and web technologies, the engineering teams skew towards higher levels of seniority. Assume that Staff Software Engineer is the most common engineering level represented across the web technologies teams, which is towards the more senior end of Google’s software engineering job ladder.
* The average base salary for Google employees working on web technologies is $240k and the average annual take-home pay is $500k, including salary, bonuses, and stock payments. These estimates are close to the current average base salary and take-home pay for Google Staff Software Engineers listed on industry salary data sites.
* Google has approximately 2000 staff working on web technologies.
Using the above assumptions, the estimated personnel cost for web technologies is 2000 * $596k = $1.2B. Of course there are additional costs associated with these businesses. Based on this sketch, it seems fair to assume that Google spends at least $1-2B annually on Chrome, Chromium, and the evolution of the web platform.
> Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I appreciate the vibes where this is coming from, but does it really? I think that assumes that everyone that works on this would work on a true open source OS otherwise, and that if they did, that would result in us breaking free from Android where we otherwise wouldn't. I'm not confident about either of those assumptions.
Meanwhile I'll keep complaining to orgs that don't allow me to work through their website, and tell them that their app won't work on my phone.
There are more OSS devs active on Android ROMs than OSS devs working on independent mobile OSes. We are running out of time, and we are misallocating ressources.
It's like bailing out water from the Titanic. We should prepare the lifeboats instead.
And there are even more devs working on Windows. It's like we're actively drilling a hole into the Titanic.
The thing is that those people aren't "resources" that you can just "reallocate". And even if they were, two extra buckets weren't going to save the Titanic.
(GNU/)Linux on mobile is the true sustanable, independent OS. It relies on the existing, strong Linux development, natively runs existing Linux apps and guarantees you lifetime updates. What else do you need?
According to the website[0] I’d need 20+ hrs idle time, video recording, Bluetooth, and GPS.
I’m being gently snarky, of course, but the goal shouldn’t be an MVP that nerds who are deeply into privacy or FOSS or hate Google can tolerate - it should be something that disinterested normies could seamlessly and happily use.
Well, it idles for about 22 hours, can record videos, does multi-constellation GNSS and both classic and LE Bluetooth.
The way to make disinterested normies able to use it is to have lots of nerds capable of fixing various papercuts themselves switch already and contribute rather than complain.
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before. IMO any competition in this space is good competition.
But the reality is that it's not quite that straightforward. Linux desktop is a perfect example of that. We have tons of nerds working on the Linux ecosystem. Many on distros meant to ease transition from Mac/Windows to Linux (like Pop OS).
But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
In some ways, Linux has become "cool" — Steam Machine and Steam Deck run Linux, and they're popular. Unfortunately, they're popular within a niche, and even then, they're popular for only a slice of digital life. People don't do work on a Steam Deck and I can't imagine many doing work on a Steam Machine.
Mobile phones are completely different though because most people have one phone. And that phone needs to do everything they need it to do. It needs to run the apps they need. It needs to play the games they want. It needs to integrate into everything. And it also needs to look trendy, because smartphones have become a bit of a status symbol of sorts.
So, while I agree that us nerds must become part of the solution than the problem, it's not enough. We need buy-in from major service providers. We need marketing. That's all stuff that the typical nerd can't/won't do.
> But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
What would she say if you asked her to install Windows? It doesn't matter. Normal people should either buy preinstalled or ask technical people for help. Using GNU/Linux desktop is as simple as Windows. It will be the same with phones one day, if we push it.
Username checks out (I kid, I'm also a fan of their work).
Also, if you're using PureOS, what's that like? Have they updated to a debian 13 base yet? Pretty much the only thing stopping me from at least trying it out is the super old version of GNOME
The parent wasn't speaking of a perfectly secure OS but about "preparing the lifeboats". Also, GNU/Linux somehow sufficiently secure on desktop, especially if you rely on the apps from the FLOSS repos.
I'm considering to switch to your device and start contributing to gnome mobile soon! I'm interested in your experience, what do you like and dislike the most on it?
Everything that works on desktop GNU/Linux should work on the phone, too. I use Pika Backup app.
> communication
AFAIK none of the apps you listed officially support Linux ARM, so you have to go through some configuration unfortunately. I do not use any of them, I use Matrix.
If you're in Europe, I saw quite a few comments here saying that banks not requiring the duopoly do exist. Otherwise, a dedicated banking phone might be the way.
If mobile Linux runs through the same kind of tortuous adoption and rejection cycle that desktop Linux is still doing, then it's a non starter before it begins.
I've been happily using it on several phones since 2008 (and writing this on one of them right now), only two years shorter than on my desktops/laptops. "Non-starter" is in the eye of the beholder.
Brave said they'll try to maintain limited support for MV2 for only 4 specific extensions, but recommend Brave Shields as the go-to adblocker for the future. Google is about to remove most of the MV2 code from the codebase, which will explode the complexity soon.
Brave has perverse incentives to discontinue it because of their BAT crypto business model that rewards looking at ads.
Unfortunately even the fully open source Firefox isn't immune to the pressure from the advertising industry, with all their Google funding and their purchase of anonym.
I do, but even though they're not in the webpage itself and are as such not affected by the adblocker, brave still has an interest in the advertising industry. Many if not most of their advertising clients would use regular internet ads as well.
Extensions prior to MV3 were notoriously insecure and granted extension developers a very wide attack surface. Assuming that Google only has a sinister reason to switch to a better standard in an ecosystem riddled with ill-intentioned actors is a bit too cynical.
Google will only ever push major updates that are neutral or beneficial to their ad revenue. I do not believe they killed MV3 due to ad blockers, but it's the type of proposal that can survive at Google.
I can call Android user hostile. Most Banks and gov apps require play services nowadays, and Google is about to ban app installation outside of their store. Cherry on top, the play store is mostly adware junk. My parents phones are full of adware, bloatware, notification spam, it's almost worse than windows 11.
In your earlier comment you said that deGoogled Android alternatives are what's "slowing us down from leaving Android entirely", but that is not consistent with saying that most banks and government apps require play services.
If these apps cannot run on deGoogled Android, then deGoogled Android cannot be slowing us down from leaving Android because using deGoogled alternatives is as inconvenient for banking and government services as using a non-Android alternative would be.
There are tweaks to enable banking apps on deGoogled Android, but it's an exhausting cat and mouse game. Most of my friends gave up after years of fighting, and now they are back on Google Android because there is no alternative.
so it's the play services. /e/OS has none of these problems except for apps that require original play services. so yeah, those don't work.
interesting tidbit: my bank offers their app from google and from huawei store. it doesn't work on /e/OS however. (but that might also be a /e/OS bug).
this means what we really need is a viable play store alternative. EU regulations could make that happen.
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
De-Googled Android was/is a truly open platform. Same result. You're pointing out maintenance issues.
How many developers do we have to maintain this or any other platform without pay? That problem applies to a de-Googled fork of Android, or a complete bottom up build of a new platform.
The benefit of using an Android fork is the labor savings on what's already built.
Maintenance is not going away just because we build a new OS.
Basically what you’re implying is that all the people working on Android derivatives like Lineage, Graphene, and /e/ coming together and working instead on a fully open source OS like a Linux mobile distribution would result in better outcomes and actually get us closer to a daily driveable open source environment phone operating system.
That’s analogous to saying that an automotive tuning shop that puts turbochargers and body kits on Toyota Corollas shouldn’t waste their time, and they should instead design and mass produce their own sports car.
The level of effort difference between AOSP derivatives and a fully open source OS is massive.
As I explained elsewhere in this post, I got to this installer page by clicking on "Check device compatibility" on the https://e.foundation/e-os/ page.
So I was actually expecting a device listing page, not a WebUSB program.
That's a bizarre one. 'You need Chrome' is bad enough, which even the bloody NHS are guilty of, but I always assume that's 'just' an assumption that not Chrome means IE or something, and they haven't woken up even to the proliferation of mobile Safari users.
I didn't know it did, the commenter didn't mention it, and Imgur gave me an overloaded error message. (When it doesn't do that, it usually tells me it's not available in my region or that the image has been deleted anyway.)
Anyway, assuming it's for WebUSB flashing, I agree with other commenters it should just explain that's not available and still give the instructions - bonus points for hiding the unusable WebUSB option.
How do they do that? I'm not doubting that, it's an honest question. I understand how this works on Apple phones but I don't understand why an identity or attestation service cannot be replaced by another one by the alternative operating system when the hardware is not controlled by Google. Does Google have keys in tamper-proof chips? How else would those banks determine their apps are on the right phone? Or do those apps use Google authentication directly over the Internet, using hard-coded Google public keys?
Depending on the level of security you ask for Play Integrity, it can be:
* is this device rooted, is it an unsigned build ?
* Device is signed, but is it part of the blessed signing keys ? is play services untampered with ?
* Additional checks over the lifetime of the device.
You could fully trust the results of Play Integrity on device, but you can also send the returned token to your server, and your server then contacts play integrity to validate that token. So unless you know how to spoof those encrypted tokens, you won't go very far.
So basically an alternative OS can offer a service like Play Integrity and the only problem is that those banks hard-code a dependence on Google's Play Integrity and Google has a monopoly for that service?
This is something that could be addressed at least in the EU by mandating banks to allow alternative services or not use this service at all.
Yep. You can even run your own play integrity-like backend.
>This is something that could be addressed at least in the EU by mandating banks to allow alternative services or not use this service at all.
The EU mandates banks to be interoperable, and to guarantee the security of users. You can solve that issue by going through an alternative app that doesn't use play integrity and is PSD2 compliant so other banks let you call their APIs. It usually requires you to be a bank, and as a bank, you're really risk averse. So you use play integrity.
Chrome is just an example. Google stopped pretending Android is a general purpose OS and started cracking down on what is possible without Google’s approval. See developer verification, everything within Google services, etc.
Why anyone ever gave that browser a second of trust is beyond be. The damn thing was built on hijacking ad revenue into some imaginary IOU crypto thing, and built by a creep.
> We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
But currently AOSP is very much open. That's also what the GrapheneOS devs say and why they want to continue using Android. Until it becomes clear that they will completely stop releasing the source code under a free software license i dont see why one should not use Android.
AOSP dev went private, and Google is slower and slower at releasing the source, now twice a year. Worse, many stock apps like the Dialer and Gallery went closed-source years ago.
But the source isn't the point, it's the governance. Just like Chrome, having the source is not enough to guarantee an open platform. Sure you can disable telemetry flags. But you cannot afford to maintain an important feature Google wants to remove, like MV2.
"Google built Android to be impossible to maintain without them."
Could be a very genuine answer to that question. Do you really need all of Android? What if you can build a very similar thing at a fraction of the size.
Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.
I wanted to add a perspective from actual daily use, because a lot of this thread sounds theoretical.
I’ve been using a Murena/Fairphone running /e/OS as my primary phone for a while now, and honestly the experience has been much smoother than I expected. My banking apps work, GPS/navigation works reliably, messaging and everyday apps behave normally — I’m not constantly fighting the device or giving things up. After the initial setup, it just feels like a normal smartphone, except noticeably quieter in terms of tracking and background noise.
What surprised me most is that this isn’t a “privacy experiment” anymore. It’s a usable, stable daily driver. I still get the convenience people worry about losing, but with far fewer ties to Google services by default.
I think a lot of people hesitate because they assume moving away from stock Android means breaking essential apps or living with constant friction. That hasn’t been my experience at all. If you’re curious but unsure, it’s genuinely worth trying — the barrier is much lower than it used to be, and you might find you don’t miss as much as you expect.
My account has more comments than that and I share OC's opinion and experience. I've been daily driving /e/ since its FP3 era and lately the experience has been really well polished. Even things that had been "tricky" in the past, like Android auto integration, now work seamlessly.
My banking app doesn't even work on the last 3 android phones I tried because it wants a very up-to-date OS which basically means non-Pixel phones more than 2 years old need not apply.
I had this problem and it turned out to be an upstream issue with MicroG which was eventually patched. If you have an error message you can search for existing issues on /e/OS' gitlab/forum.
Revolut stopped working for me for a while with the error that the bootloader wasn't recognised and rooted phones aren't supported. After about a month an OS update solved it.
As long as banking works with web browsers, I think the future looks good for this usage, but I could de-bank my phone and still have plenty of useful things to do with it.
the problem in my case is that the authentication for the banks website requires an app, and that app doesn't work. i am locked out of online banking for that bank because of it. (they also have a windows app that i could not yet get to work on linux/wine)
Tbh I am using /e/OS as my daily driver and I fully agree, it just works.
Bonus points for the Nextcloud integration which I can tie to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance.
I do not understand all the negativity, I think it is a solid alternative in the ecosystem, and choice is a good thing.
It's pretty strange that the only subject you seem to have expertise in is e/os. Over a year and that's the only thing you've felt comfortable in discussing?
I think this is behavior that should be encouraged online. Staying quiet and letting the experts talk to increase the signal to noise ratio is a GOOD thing. OP has hands on experience with something that is at least for now quite niche.
I used to only really speak about node.js topics because that was what I had real fighting experience with, at a scale beyond what most webdevs had ever seen. Those were also my most upvoted posts by far.
I get what you are saying, and if that's what the OP was doing I'd somewhat agree with you.
However, if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to read over their past comments. They all read almost identical to the start of this thread. Before this post they had something like 3 other comments on HN and they were all about how great /e/OS is. All of them have a blurb about the privacy focus of /e/OS. They all read like copy from marketing.
That is bizarre commenting behavior for a niche OS. And these weren't comments about using /e/OS, but rather comments speaking positively about using it.
Your posts on node.js, I assume, weren't all "Node.js is the greatest programming environment I've ever used. It's so smooth and fast." Instead, I'd wager your highly upvoted comments contained useful information about using node.js.
I'd also say, that there are people that work for various software tech companies who post here. The best comments I see almost always start with "Full disclosure, I work for X". Those are far better received.
and so what? should I ask for permission to discuss something? it's crazy how omniscient people are aggressive on the internet. Is that your normal behaviour IRL??
Good stuff! This feels very human. How do you feel about Murena? I feel like like they're very much a "Next Gen" privacy tech company. I've also heard they're crowd-funding!?
This is behavior of an astroturfer, that's so what. Which is why you are being accused of that. It looks suspicious.
> should I ask for permission to discuss something?
Nope, the opposite. If you want to look like a non-astroturfer then engagement with other topics on the site would do that.
If you only engage with a single topic over the years and the only thing you contribute is "This is the absolute best working OS I've used, everyone should use it. I endorse it fully". People are going to be, understandably, suspicious of your motivations.
> it's crazy how omniscient people are aggressive on the internet.
We live in an internet filled with advertisements. Most of us have seen astroturfing. That's why we suspect you.
> Is that your normal behaviour IRL??
Absolutely it is! If someone knocks on my door telling me about the wonders of pest control, you'll forgive me for not taking their endorsement for the program they are selling as being solid. Same thing happens in churches. I'm instantly suspicious of someone that starts singing the praises of a product in church and, magically, starts hosting parties where they talk about the wonders of said product (see MLM).
This is a fact of living in a capitalist society. There's always an incentive to sell which makes everyone suspicious of product endorsements. Especially when that seems to be the only thing a person is capable of doing.
I can vouch for your experience as mine has been the same, also on a Fairphone on which I installed /e/OS. I could have literally written the same comment myself — em-dash usage included!
it was supposed to be a temporary name, that i believe was intentionally chosen to be bad to make it easier to replace later. they were under pressure because the original name eelo had a trademark issue.
when they eventually found a new name "murena" it appears they then decided to use it as a brand for the phones that they themselves sell instead, keeping /e/OS as the name for the operating system
The irony of advertising a privacy-enabled de-googled system, and then telling me that my Firefox browser is not support, and that I should use Edge, Opera or Chrome instead....
This is related to Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher and the scope of what it can do should be limited. As such, it should not be allowed to e.g. control peripherals like the USB devices.
Which is in my opinion a fairly reasonable take.
But given the current situation, I would assume that the companies providing WebUSB tools like installers would also spend a few moments to create e.g. a Python script that would do the same thing but locally. So that anyone unwilling to use WebUSB within their browser can have a vetted and transparent way to get the same thing done.
And, to counter the arguments that "the site tells you that you need WebUSB support": you get to the https://e.foundation/installer/ when you click "Check device compatibility" on the main page. Personally, I'd expect either a check that works in any browser or a simple compatible device list. Why would I need a special browser just to check if I can use this OS?
main page -> download and try! -> check device compatibility
lands on https://e.foundation/installer/ the chromium-only webusb page. It could be a better page; instead of showing a scary "navigator not suppored" modal demanding you install a particular browser, it could say the automated compatibility tester requires one of these browsers and your phone plugged in with USB, otherwise here's the device finder page
It's the specific functionality needed here that Firefox lacks that makes the /e/ page show the warning, unlike the lineage page that does not have the problem in the first place.
Google's hardware is just hardware. It is not locked down like the hardware of many other manufacturers. Moreover, it's the only such hardware which also allows you, the user, to lock it down for your own security. GrapheneOS is not just focused around avoiding Google, it's more accurately focused around security and user choice.
The goal is to give you the option to avoid needing to rely on Google's spying or services while not having to compromise on security.
None of these other solutions regularly get included in Celebrite's documentation as being an explicit benchmark of their software's ability to break into phones. And that's almost certainly due to the fact that unless you leverage hardware security features like what GrapheneOS (and stock Android on a Pixel, and iOS on an iPhone) utilises, you have no chance of going against any actual adversaries.
And I'm not just talking about state actors here, even drive-by opportunistic attacks are likelier on a random other phone running some other Android build.
So yeah, you are running Google hardware, that doesn't make you "googled". It's just a sad reflection on the reality of the hardware landscape. If you want the same security as what GrapheneOS offers, you will currently need to use a Pixel.
I'd be curious to see what comes out of their Motorola partnership though.
Why are we degoogling, for what purpose? I couldn't care less about giving them what likely amounts to ~10€ of margin per year on the hardware sale. What I care about is not giving them data which is worth a lot more than that, and to take back control over my device.
When you go with an alternative you lose superior privacy and security offered by GrapheneOS and you just end up leaking more data back to Google and other ad-tech companies than you would otherwise, negating any benefits several times over.
I think it’s very valid. I want to be hardware-independent, not only OS independent. I need graphene to work on a fairphone, jolla phone or whatever other alternatives there are. E/os can do that (to an extent), Graphene can’t for probably very good reason, but still: It‘s not an alternative then.
I must agree, you are right, GOS is only on Pixel phones.
But we have to keep in mind that /e/ has a lot of problems, the only one solved is sending data to Google. The security aspect of the OS is problematic and some key elements of a privacy seem questioning (AI integration, commercial collaborations, ...).
Uploading speech-to-text to OpenAI? Regular communication with Google? Using Google for assisted GPS? Giving a bunch of Google apps privileged access (if you need them for e.g. Android Auto)?
Well and besides that only shipping ASBs and no other security updates outside major Android releases (and both usually late). Using heavily outdated kernel trees (e.g. FP4 is using a Linux kernel patch level that hasn't been updated since 2020!), outdated vendor firmware blobs, etc.
It might work, but it is not very secure, nor very private.
The OS is working well, but have privacy and security concerns.
Is it better than a stock OS? I don't know, maybe, maybe not, it depends on the stock OS.
Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.
I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.
/e/OS is Android, meaning it's still critically dependent on goodwill of Google to continue releasing their work as part of AOSP.
So if you're trying to be a silly purist, then /e/OS doesn't fit either. If you're not, getting a Pixel will significantly enhance your safety since they're better supported for security patches and better designed in hardware when it comes to security.
I think it is legitimate to be a purist about smartphones, but I don't think the GP is. So, let's talk about the non-purist situation: Users like us want to de-google. But we are not willing to make all of the sacrifices that purists do. The question is then, what can we use (and - what projects can we support financially).
Now, we can use GrapheneOS if we have Google Pixel's. But - most people don't have those phones, for any number of reasons. One of them is price, by the way: You can get a decent smartphone for under 100 USD and even a half-decent one for 70 USD. And most people in the world are not in an economic situation where you can tell them "shell out 300 USD and buy a Google Pixel".
Moreover - suggesting we strengthen our ties to Google in order to de-Google is fundamentally problematic. Even if we're not going all the way, we are striving to distance ourselves from them.
So, an imperfect software solution for a wider selection of phones does sound quite useful. Change my mind! :-)
GOS is degoogled in all the ways that I care about - it's about the data they can gather. Among all the smartphone options that I consider usable day to day (leaving only Android and iOS at the moment), GOS is the most private and secure.
The post about Graphene partnering with Motorola is right about this one, currently, (Lenovo bought Motorola from Google in 2014.), so that point will no longer be valid as soon as they ship something.
If you can use GrapheneOS, good for you but what /e/OS offers is:
- Usable Android with your usual Android app (banking, etc)
- No data sent to Google by default
- Easier interface with nearly no bloatware
- Available easily on many smartphones, including older ones
- Extending the life of some smartphones
The price to pay is:
- Some Murena cloud bloatware
- Android security patches are sometimes delayed
- Security is not on par with GrapheneOS
If your main concern is protecting your privacy from Google and extending the life of your smartphone without breaking a sweat, /e/OS is probably the best option.
If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats, then GrapheneOS might be better.
/e/OS works really great for non-techie users. I’ve done it in my family.
GrapheneOS is just another OS. It's no less usable than /e/ and it is no more difficult to get a phone with it than /e/. You can purchase both preinstalled.
I have phones with both, but I don't necessarily agree that /e/OS is easier. E.g. things like doing or restoring in-app purchases often do not work, even when logging in through microG. Want that nice backup option that Signal is now offering? Well, good luck, you cannot purchase it on /e/OS (at least I couldn't). In general when it comes to compatibility, my experience is that GrapheneOS is better because it can use real Google Play Services, albeit sandboxed. I think you can use the Play Store on /e/OS as well, but it's going to have higher privileges.
They also use Google for assisted GPS when you use it, eSIM provisioning, widevine provisioning. Last time I checked, microG on /e/OS also downloads a Google binary blob for SafetyNet.
Besides analytics, if you install Google Apps (e.g. for Android Auto), many of them get higher privileges on /e/OS.
The price to pay is:
I would also add installing F-Droid apps (if you use App Lounge) through 'CleanAPK', without wanting to reveal why this is necessary or who owns/maintains CleanAPK.
They do quite a lot of fishy stuff. It may be incompetence, but yeah...
If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats
This always sounds like systems like GrapheneOS are for paranoid people. But this is basically you if you ever go to a demonstration (e.g. in the US) or cross borders of certain countries (e.g. of the US), sadly things like Cellebrite have become very common. Then suddenly layered protection, not running years behind in security patches, a duress pin, or rebooting after not unlocking for a few minutes to get back to BFU aren't so bad. (IANAL, figure out yourself which of these are legal and not destruction of evidence.)
I find it interesting that there are so many comments that are saying "Don't use this one use this one it's better!"
But what I think a lot of people are missing is what you exactly just touched on. We have options! That's a good thing. Yeah, some options are not as good as others if you wanna optimize for X. Then don't use that option! Use the option that works for you.
To me, the fact that alternatives exist on varying spectra of "degoogle-fication" is a win in my book. The fact that we're able to talk about and recommend so many alternatives is a good thing.
There absolutely is when your concern is not only moving away from Google but also using sustainable hardware like Fairphone, which GrapheneOS doesn't support afaik.
Even on non-pixel devices, unless you really want to use the /e/ "ecosystem, there are probably better options like LineageOS for microG iodéOS.
(/e/ used to be heavily based on an outdated version of LineageOS for microG. I'm not sure what the current state is after I settled on second-hand pixel with graphene)
iodé is available for my device as well, but it looked fairly similar to /e/OS to me (and the latter has an official partnership with my phone's manufacturer). What makes it a better option - should I switch?
When I looked into it, /e/ constantly used to be many months late with security updates. LineageOS for microg and iodé were much quicker (~ 1 month max which is still not that great).
Hmm, possibly I'm looking in the wrong place, but as far as I can remember, I've been getting new /e/OS versions about every month, and looking at the release notes [1], they usually seem to include the latest "Android security patches", which I assume is what's relevant - unless there's something else that should also be included?
Because upstream LineageOS doesn't support microg out of the box. You can install it but it needs signature spoofing to pass Google's SafetyNet garbage.
Bonus point for some roms that allow you to relock the bootloader after the install (iodéOS, CalyxOS).
I can't check my device compatibility without Chrome or edge. Is there a reason I can't just see a list of compatible devices to confirm (as I suspect) that it won't work on my phone?
Looks cool, but burns a bit of credibility by ripping off Apple's icon designs.
There has to be some fresh-out-of-college graphic designer in Berlin ready to make their name by designing a custom icon library for a project like this, ask around.
I you ever cross a border or attend a demonstration, privacy requires security. Unfortunately, /e/OS (and most hardware) is severely lacking in that department.
I'm currently looking for a new Android phone. I don't like the Pixel and deep integration with Google. I looked at the Fairphone with /e/OS and the Pixel with GrapheneOS, but unfortunately there's no certainty that everything will work or where the boundary is between Google Android and "clean" Android. For example, it turned out that Android Auto is essentially Google Auto and I don't what find out what is dependent on Google. I want something that just works. A phone isn't something I want to tinker with like Linux ten years ago. So basically the choice comes down to Samsung and Chinese brands.
As an average user, I don't understand all the ins and outs of an Android system, but I'm very happy to use /e/OS on my Fairphone 4 every day. I don't have a Google account, but I can still use all the apps I need, including French banking apps (CMB, Endenred+).
My only regret is that the simplified installation tool didn't work (my FP4 kept restarting), so I had to install it manually, which makes it inaccessible to users who are even less tech-savvy than me.
Finally, I still think it's an excellent alternative to Android, but we need to go further and allow our smartphones to work with other operating systems, particularly Linux. I am hopeful that one day we will have a Linux OS for our smartphones that performs as well as /e/OS (I have heard about Jolla smartphones and Sailfish OS, but unfortunately I have not tested them).
I get the appeal of degoogling, but this seems to just be replacing that with alternatives run by another commercial company, just one I've never heard of before.
Why does it even need "One account for your privacy" ... "Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the centre of the ecosystem" when it'd be even better to have everything on-device without an account at all.
Even more, Murena seems to be owned by Qwant who seem to be in the business of selling a search engine, and while they currently claim to be all about user privacy, this is basically exactly how Google started nearly 30 years ago.
I wonder if they'd be happy if, for instance, somebody took this system and debundled Murena and switched it to using duckduckgo. Would they embrace that too, or sue them into oblivion?
I think I was wrong. Googling suggest that Qwant is owned by Octave Klaba, the founder and majority owner of OVH. Murena seems to be owned by Gaël Duval.
It's just from their website a lot of mentions of Murena seemed to say powered by Qwant, or similar, and so it looked like they were closely linked.
I have both a Jolla C2 phone, and an E/Os device, on a nothing CMS1 phone. Both are great. I like the Jolla Phone for its SailfishOS, which has great UI/Ux. I am less enthusiastic about the hardware. (good enough though) The E/OS really is good, all apps work good, and really much is done for privacy protection. But if the hardware is more performant, and with a few extra features i'd still opt for SailfishOS
That is all nice and well, but Google is primarily an advertisement business. A huge corporation that gained enormous power that operates only to satisfy its own self interest. So that gives us non-Googlers more to think about than just that consideration to take into account.
It is an entirely realistic scenario which afaik data backs up that most people don't change their default privacy related settings which Google profits from, but in case of actually setting their provided privacy settings ON, they do work.
What do you mean by "better [...] at handling sensitive info"? As in, they are more technically competent, or they will treat your data more ethically?
I don't think these projects claim they've got better infrastructure for handling private data, just that they won't sell it to advertisers. I trust Google are experts at handling my data, I just don't want them to.
If you block Google, as much of it as possible anyway, on your firewall, does the device work/install? I tried /e/ and Lineage about a year ago, but neither of them worked when Google was blocked completely. The only one that made no requests to Google was Graphene.
* /e/OS sends user speech data to OpenAI without consent [1], and thought this was ok until they got caught [2].
* /e/OS massively delays security patches, and calls this a "standard industry practice" [3]. Meanwhile, GrapheneOS' opt-in security preview releases provide early access to security updates prior to official disclosure [4]. Also see [0] (Security update speed) and [7] (WebView being 40 security updates behind).
* microG downloads and executes proprietary Google binaries in a privileged environment [5] [6]. You can obviously not audit these, nor should this count as "degoogled".
* microG still phones home to Google by default (android.clients.google.com for device registration check-in, mtalk.google.com for FCM push, firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com for SIM activations) [7].
[0] has a comparison of popular privacy and security-focused Android-based OS, which paints the whole picture. Privacy-friendly does not necessarily mean secure, but in this case "privacy-friendly" is quite a stretch already.
My phone (Teracube) is running /e/OS now for 2 years. Nearly everything works out of the box (bank apps, e-identity apps etc ..). The only issue I have is that the app I use to take contactless payment on the phone via NFC does not work (while it works using Android).
For how polished the launcher looks, it's a bit jarring to install /e/ and realize that under the hood, all the apps are just running a very stock Material theme. I'm not shaming the developers; developing a custom theme is no doubt an involved task that they don't have the resources for.
I have been using e/OS but moved away when an upgrade to the next version required to manually wipe the device. I could cope with the little inconveniences of a degoogled phone, but wiping the device myself following a unclear procedure was too much for me. My phone is not a hacking subject. It's a tool. Still, it worked reasonably well and I would have upgraded and kept using it if the upgrade had been easier.
I am on e/OS since 2021 with a FP3 and, for what is worth, I never had to reinstall, wipe or anything. My phone just had it's 5th birthday and it has been a single continuous set of updates.
I know the versions differ by model, so perhaps your model was not as well supported.
It was the gigaset gs190. I've used it quite some time with e/os, but one day the automatic updates stopped working and I discovered this reinstallation requirement.
I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
>Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the centre of the ecosystem, allowing to store, back up and retrieve your data safely on remote servers.
This sounds like their version is somewhat married to Murena. While probably better than Google, still not independent.
They're also advertising features such as "hiding your IP address [...] when you feel like it" – which sounds a lot like a VPN – without mentioning much about who the traffic is going through or how they might log it.
> I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm is a fairly complete comparison. One of GrapheneOS' biggest features is that they sandbox Google services (if you choose to install them), whereas e/OS gives them privileged access by default (via microG). Calling it a "degoogled" OS while microG uses Google's proprietary blobs is... a choice.
I'm on /e/OS and don't use Murena Workspace (which I think is just a Nextcloud instance that they host). For the past couple of years in which I've used it, I have felt zero pressure to use Murena Workspace. Though I imagine it might be neat if you host your own Nextcloud instance, which might be nicely integrated too.
(That said, yes, I don't quite trust their VPN or app store, since it's unclear who's running it - in the latter's case, I imagine that's also a legal matter.)
So we replace an OS owned by a search engine (Google) with an OS owned by a search engine (Murena)? You're going to need to give me more details than that before I consider switching.
I'm an /e/OS user with a Murena account and I had never even heard of Murena being "a search engine". After searching (on DDG), I see that they in June 2025 they launched a collaboration with the Qwant search engine to launch a Murena-branded version: https://murena.com/discover-murena-find-your-new-privacy-fir...
That does not make it "an OS owned by a search engine".
Why rip off Apple design so much here (see homescreen image). Seems like a lot of unnecessary effort. Plus it’s not done well enough so instead of looking like itself, it looks like a bad ripoff.
Overall, everything works pretty well for me (user for multiple years), except all apps which are too bound too Google Play Services as microG is not stubbing/implementing all APIs.
So all apps with premium subscription you can only handle through in-app purchase, usually won't work.
I've heard that some banking apps are not working correctly either as not "secured" enough device, in my personal experience, they all worked, it's really a case-by-case logics here.
For the upgrade, OTA upgrade around every month, and it has always worked smoothly
Not that it matters but I just noticed certain titles on their website can be edited. For example the text "Use our /e/OS Installer" can be modified and I noticed it because I accidentally pasted my clipboard there. I suppose contenteditable should be set to "false".
fuck me i'm doing work even though i should be working right now
At the link, I see a lot of text about a company called Murena. Including:
> Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the
> centre of the ecosystem, allowing to store, back up and retrieve your
> data safely on remote servers.
That seems to suggest that we would be replacing one large overbearing corporation with a smaller and less-evil overbearing corporation. Is e/OS an open-source facade for Murena?
The timing of this post right below the Motorola/GrapheneOS partnership is pretty funny.
I've been running /e/OS on a Fairphone for about a year now. The experience is... fine. Not great. App compatibility is the main pain point. Banking apps are hit or miss even with microG. Updates lag behind GrapheneOS significantly.
The Murena cloud stuff is the part that bothers me most. You're trading one cloud dependency for another. At least with GrapheneOS you get a clean slate and can choose your own sync solution (Nextcloud, whatever).
That said, /e/ supports way more devices than GrapheneOS does. For people who can't or won't buy a Pixel (or now Motorola), it's one of the few options. The real question is whether the Motorola partnership changes the calculus. If GrapheneOS gets proper OEM support, the device limitation argument mostly goes away.
Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
Look at the AdBlocker crackdown of Google Chrome. Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it, because it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser that Google spends >$1B/year to develop.
Same story for /e/ and GrapheneOS, the day Google pulls the plug on source code releases, god knows how long they will last. We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
>Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing. Running Ubuntu Touch isn't a viable option. Neither is postmarket, librem, tizen, they're all terrible. Security wise, for something as critically important in our lives as a smartphone, I am also not trusting any new pet project that won't be stable for 10 years.
Sure, you might be a poweruser that doesn't care about your phone burning its battery in your pocket after 1 hour because you know how to SSH on it from your watch and put it in sleep, but that's not a viable option. Leaving Android is suicide. A large part of its critical underpinnings are already into the kernel anyways, just disabled. (although a distro running binder could be a fun project). APIs are reverse engineerable generally speaking, except for the server part of play services. But then, if your issue is "my bank won't let me access their app without play services attesting me", I have great news, you won't even have an app for it on your new OS anyways, so it will not work by default. There's already not enough people working on GrapheneOS _or_ on mainstream linux OSes, what makes you think the sitation won't be ten times worse for your custom made mobile OS ?
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
Android is one, and that can never be taken away. Google pulls the plug ? cool, you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community. Hell, for all the shit that Google is doing, they're still constrained by having to work with other vendors: the system privileged notification receiver is swappable at build time, the recent app signing/verification system also is, because Samsung wouldn't let them control it all.
I do agree, mobile OSS OSes are rough. My point is that we should help them instead of helping Google's toxic relationship. It happened with Chrome/Blink, and everyone already forgot that lesson.
About hard-forking Android, no one was brave enough (pun intended) to do that for Chrome, considering the insane complexity and engineering costs (>$1B/y). (Only Apple was able to affort it with Webkit/Safari, but they are in the ad business too.)
I kinda dont see how both of you cant be right. We need a mobile OS that google isnt involved in. Why not use pure open source android to do it. It can only be cheaper than making it from scratch, since it has alot of work already done on it
(Copying my reply from below)
Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.
> Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
And yet the GrapheneOS devs seem to be managing just fine.
> But I agree that it is a significant endeavor.
Yes, in fact it is orders of magnitude more significant an endeavor that just building upon and improving the existing AOSP stack.
Should not the Netscape -> Mozilla example be a good inspiration in that regard?
chrome was the fork. KHTML from Konqueror became webkit became Safari and chrome.
I still use Konqueror occasionally. It no longer uses KHTML (it uses blink now iirc through Qt webengine (which just got webextension support, someone's working on adding them to falkon so I'm sure Konqueror isn't too far behind)) but it works surprisingly well. It's still a great file manager if any of you remember how good it was
What about Sailfish OS? I heard good things about it, but didn't dare switch... yet. Does anyone have some 1st hand experience?
The whole notion of smartphones is designed for intrusive user surveillance, from the regulatory side to the hardware itself to the software designed for it.
We need tablet computers that don't have hostile hardware like cameras and mics and sensor suites that can be remotely controlled, under proprietary firmware, completely out of owner control.
We need radio hardware and software that is entirely under owner control, with protocols and standards based connection controls; the notion that spectrum and cellular make network connectivity magically necessary to put under the draconian gatekeeping and surveillance of cellular carriers is flaming dumpster garbage.
The carriers are a primary threat vector. The hardware is a primary threat vector. The software is a primary threat vector.
There is absolutely no way to fix the current cellular phone security status quo, every single facet is designed to be leaky and allow "good guys" backdoored access "for the right reasons" and so on, whether it's "user experience telemetry" or "we have a warrant".
Running bog standard linux with sensible security defaults and a good softphone over an internet connection would be fine. There's nothing magical about phones or UX or wtfever this month's marketing rationalization is.
Handheld tablet computers with optional hardware, or even modular hardware, are going to be the future. The current paradigm of parasitic cellular carriers, invasive governmental regulatory bodies working on behalf of all sorts of corrupt interests, and complicit hardware manufacturers are 100% all in on milking consumers for every last unearned penny or intercepted PII they can get their grubby hands on.
> There are zero OSes that are 1/ open source 2/ appropriate for phones 3/ with good hardware support. There's absolutely nothing
Sailfish?
Fundamentally, not enough. Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device. Firejail is a good start, but proper user isolation as Android does is the right solution (each app is a different user, and accessing their data/user data is only done through Providers, or IPC), and anything else is naively trusting and not enough, no matter how many layers of sandboxing and suid-ing you do. Doubly so when all of its apps are written in C++. Can't wait to deal with use-after-free on my mobile device.
In addition, its compatibility with android apps is also chains: why would I bother developing for sailfish (especially since it involves Qt / Qt Creator) when I can just develop an Android app, and say it'll run well enough (unless it needs play integrity, which is the same problem, or somehow falls behind in android/androidx compatibility)
> Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device.
Linux has SELinux as a default option which Android makes good use of, some forks more than others, and setup correctly it is better than user isolation. You could also recreate the protection user isolation provides through policy alone.
> Linux's default security mechanisms are simply too weak for something as potentially hostile as a mobile device.
Honest question: why are mobile devices more hostile than laptops/desktops?
It is _the_ 2FA device. from SMS, to authenticators, to password managers, etc. It also has access to all of your personal information, your pictures, your contacts, your email. It actively receives notifications and messages from the outside world, from potentially any sender. It's connected through WiFi, GPS, 5G, bluetooth, UWB, every possible connection system imaginable. It can listen to your phone calls, read your text messages, interact on your behalf with pretty much everything in your life, and is a single facial recognition away from automating emptying your bank account. Not to mention the fact that mobile software does tend to want to at least survive a little bit when offline, so plenty of data is stored locally.
It's a key to your life. The perfect target for any attacker.
Because regular users (non-techies) install all kinds of apps on their phones, from all kinds of sources/vendors, but not on their desktop. Most people use only a handful of applications on their desktop (browser, office suite, …) but they have dozens if not hundreds of different apps on their phone.
Not entirely FOSS, unfortunately :( (though, it would be cool to see someone take their kernel and implement Plasma Mobile on it)
> you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community.
It's far ahead, but at the same time, I think we shouldn't over-emphasise how much. Functionality at the beginning of a project's lifetime is way more important than incremental improvements (or just changes) made later, and thus while much more effort has been invested into Android, new projects primarily need to catch up when it comes to e.g. phone call support and stability, and won't have to redo a lot of the effort of e.g. implementing Material You 3 or whatever.
Which is to say that we're still years out from a viable competitor, but at the same time, there could be one five years from now, which is also not that long.
Material 3 is mostly not part of the AOSP tree (aside from some very, very deep code like shadows) and is just UI libraries. I actually wonder if M3 has View implementations, or if everything has been migrated to Compose.
You're also underestimating the amount of fundamental work that goes in Android. The vast majority is hardware integration. It's not all fancy little bells and whistles. It would have the added benefit of not having to relearn the security mistakes like LIST_ALL_PACKAGES or READ_SMS permissions being open to all, at least.
>critically important in our lives
This is the sad part. I've resisted that slippery slope as much as possible. In part because of ideological reasons, and in part for usability reasons. I have large hands and poor eyesight - using a phone for non-trivial tasks is tedious. I think the only thing I encounter from time to time that requires a smartphone is paying for parking. Everything else I do from a desktop, or don't do at all (doom-scrolling etc.)
I wish society would resist the smartphonification of everything for no reason. A lot of it is marketing- and surveillance-driven.
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones compared to the developing resources available.
> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it
That's just wrong, there are other forks that still support MV2 extensions right now, and at least brave has no plans of shutting down MV2 extensions even after Google removes MV2 from upstream completely. It will certainly add maintance effort on brave's side, but they already patch a million other things that upstream doesn't support.
(Reposting my comment from below)
Brave said they'll try to maintain temporarily limited MV2 support for only 4 specific extensions, but recommend Brave Shields as the go-to adblocker for the future. Google is about to remove most of the MV2 code from the codebase, which will explode the complexity soon.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
The word "temporarily" isn't mentioned anywhere on that page, and that's already a very different claim to "Brave is about to shut down MV2". And the MV2 support is not specific to those 4 extensions, the hosting on Brave's servers is (though for other extensions not that much changes with MV3 anyway).
MV2 is behind a flag for now, but it is about to be removed from the Chrome codebase entirely. Which is why Brave recommends using Brave Shields as the long-term solution, which does not depend on it.
> Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system?
The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years, and will likely fall 100x further. So actually, yes, thanks to AI it probably actually is reasonable to launch a fully new stack from scratch.
>The cost of writing code has fallen 100x in the past 3 years
Maybe, but the cost of actually shipping a product has fallen by maybe 10%. I don't see dozens of production ready mainstream OSes and web browsers popping up because LLM can dump tens of lines of code per second.
As a startup founder shipping product, I strongly disagree with that.
Give it 12 months, you will see dozens of from-scratch large scale software projects shipping. New web browsers, new operating systems, new gaming engines, new productivity software, we are at the threshold of having an abundance of software that was previously only available from large corporations.
> Not sustainable as opposed to what, exactly? Developing and maintaining a completely different mobile operating system? Focusing on truly open platforms sound nice in theory, but completely falls apart the moment you consider what people want to do with their phones compared to the developing resources available.
Multiple open source desktop/laptop operating systems are maintained.
I appreciate that there are people out there working on stuff like /e/OS, but the number one question I have when I learn about a mobile OS that isn't iOS or "Googled" Android is: will the banking and payment apps I need to operate in the modern world run on this OS?
A lot of people don't think this way because they haven't had any problems. But then one day it happens to you and you realize, ok, this is the one thing that matters - you're in a cashless store and the only way you can pay for your meal is to use Approved Apple or Approved Google operating systems.
Where I live, the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
To their credit Graphene maintains a global database of which of these apps work and don't. They're the only ones I know of so a thousand upvotes to Graphene OS.
But for my banks, the records in that database are grim. They won't run on Graphene, and they don't respond to reports about it.
One of my banks just discontinued its web UI because "people don't use it anymore, they use the app only."
This is how they're going to get us, folks. This is how we're going to lose it all. Writing code alone will not solve this. It will require some kind of collective action to defend our liberties. Some parts of the world are already lost. So this situation will likely come to a jurisdiction near you eventually: to make a transaction you will need permission from Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, or it won't happen. Then that four company list will start to shrink.
> the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
These are self-inflicted problems by these apps. Nothing to do with the OS. These apps simply don't work. Complain to the companies that push these broken apps to you.
Would you buy a microwave oven that kills itself if you play the wrong kind of music in your kitchen?
The problems may be inflicted by these apps but the reality is that in many cases you're stuck with them. Electric company freezes your account if you enable USB debugging? Well, you can't choose a new electric company. We can complain to these vendors all we want but they just ignore us.
So these problems become problems of the OS, not because the OS has a problem, but because it affects the reality of using the OS.
Is it such a burden to write them a letter stating, "Because you have decided to disable my electronic access, I am notifying you that I withdraw my consent to e-delivery. Please provide me statements and directions to mail you a check for payment." Maybe spend 20-30 min to find the specific laws that give you the right to do that and remind them of their timelines to comply.
Send a letter like that certified. It gets attention, and the time to write and mail a check really isn't, if you batch your bills, more than using an app.
We do have ways to push their inconvenience back on them.
It is great that you have the right in your jurisdiction to do that. Where I am, they just shut off your power if you don't pay.
It's a big and hairy world out there. Having lived on three continents and traveled to some pretty wild places, I always get a kick out of seeing which rights people have and assume that the rest of the world also has.
Not everyone has the time and resources to battle their utilities and bank(s). I know it’s important and sustained effort is necessary even if it’s hard, but we are talking about massive populations here and most people simply can’t or won’t fight that battle on their own. Organizing a large pushback is also a huge effort. And at the end of the day, there is an easy solution for folks: buy a “proper” smart phone that “just works” because it solves the problem now.
We’ve gotten to the point where unfortunately it is a luxury to fight for your privacy and consumer rights.
Fighting for your rights is usually not the easy path, yes. It's been like that since forever.
It obviously depends on where you live. In my country you certainly con choose a new electric company. I mention that because we really should use consumer choice to overcome these types of problems where we can. Ie if you can switch to a bank/electricity provider/whatever that has a less terrible app it’s really good to do so.
You’re implying we have more choice than we do and asking “the average joe” to change banks to accommodate their smartphone is not a serious suggestion.
My utility company, for instance, literally won’t let you navigate their site with a VPN running. These kinds of practices are commonplace and becoming standard.
I promise your electric company accepts payments outside of an app on your phone. I further promise that other banks are available that don't have terrible apps. These problems are way more surmountable than you're painting them here.
The alternative they accept is traveling down to their office and handing them cash, no joke. Phone app or cash. No website, never has been one. No snail mail because they "modernized" and discontinued it some time ago.
But I'm OK because one of my banking apps has some method of reading my contract number from the disabled electricity company app, and telling me how much I should pay and then it fires off a payment to them. Even though I can no longer use the electricity app directly because I enabled USB debugging once, the banking app is somehow still able to pick up this info from it.
Of course, said banking app refuses to run on Graphene or any of these other Google Play-less OSes, and the bank doesn't respond to inquiries about that issue, multiple people have tried.
The other bank I use does respond, and says they'll never run on "alternative OSes" because "alternative OSes are too insecure." They don't respond to followups.
I'm just saying man. A lot of people think this stuff is trivially solved because there is an option available to them in their home country. You don't know how big and nuts this world of 8 billion people and 200 countries is. This stuff varies beyond imagination, sometimes for the much worse.
Plus, you can still do electronic banking and payments. Use your computer, it's a much better experience anyways
Until they start locking that behind shitty proprietary "security" solutions too.
Can't you pay with a card?
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.
Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).
Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.
Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).
Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...
> that Google spends >$1B/year to develop.
Let's see...
https://www.techpolicy.press/the-true-cost-of-browser-innova...
* Most of the personnel involved in developing web technologies are engineers, but they also include product managers, sales, marketing, legal, customer support, and other functions.
* Given the complexity of Chrome and web technologies, the engineering teams skew towards higher levels of seniority. Assume that Staff Software Engineer is the most common engineering level represented across the web technologies teams, which is towards the more senior end of Google’s software engineering job ladder.
* The average base salary for Google employees working on web technologies is $240k and the average annual take-home pay is $500k, including salary, bonuses, and stock payments. These estimates are close to the current average base salary and take-home pay for Google Staff Software Engineers listed on industry salary data sites.
* Google has approximately 2000 staff working on web technologies.
Using the above assumptions, the estimated personnel cost for web technologies is 2000 * $596k = $1.2B. Of course there are additional costs associated with these businesses. Based on this sketch, it seems fair to assume that Google spends at least $1-2B annually on Chrome, Chromium, and the evolution of the web platform.
> Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I appreciate the vibes where this is coming from, but does it really? I think that assumes that everyone that works on this would work on a true open source OS otherwise, and that if they did, that would result in us breaking free from Android where we otherwise wouldn't. I'm not confident about either of those assumptions.
Meanwhile I'll keep complaining to orgs that don't allow me to work through their website, and tell them that their app won't work on my phone.
There are more OSS devs active on Android ROMs than OSS devs working on independent mobile OSes. We are running out of time, and we are misallocating ressources.
It's like bailing out water from the Titanic. We should prepare the lifeboats instead.
And there are even more devs working on Windows. It's like we're actively drilling a hole into the Titanic.
The thing is that those people aren't "resources" that you can just "reallocate". And even if they were, two extra buckets weren't going to save the Titanic.
(GNU/)Linux on mobile is the true sustanable, independent OS. It relies on the existing, strong Linux development, natively runs existing Linux apps and guarantees you lifetime updates. What else do you need?
Sent from my Librem 5.
According to the website[0] I’d need 20+ hrs idle time, video recording, Bluetooth, and GPS.
I’m being gently snarky, of course, but the goal shouldn’t be an MVP that nerds who are deeply into privacy or FOSS or hate Google can tolerate - it should be something that disinterested normies could seamlessly and happily use.
[0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Well, it idles for about 22 hours, can record videos, does multi-constellation GNSS and both classic and LE Bluetooth.
The way to make disinterested normies able to use it is to have lots of nerds capable of fixing various papercuts themselves switch already and contribute rather than complain.
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before. IMO any competition in this space is good competition.
But the reality is that it's not quite that straightforward. Linux desktop is a perfect example of that. We have tons of nerds working on the Linux ecosystem. Many on distros meant to ease transition from Mac/Windows to Linux (like Pop OS).
But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
In some ways, Linux has become "cool" — Steam Machine and Steam Deck run Linux, and they're popular. Unfortunately, they're popular within a niche, and even then, they're popular for only a slice of digital life. People don't do work on a Steam Deck and I can't imagine many doing work on a Steam Machine.
Mobile phones are completely different though because most people have one phone. And that phone needs to do everything they need it to do. It needs to run the apps they need. It needs to play the games they want. It needs to integrate into everything. And it also needs to look trendy, because smartphones have become a bit of a status symbol of sorts.
So, while I agree that us nerds must become part of the solution than the problem, it's not enough. We need buy-in from major service providers. We need marketing. That's all stuff that the typical nerd can't/won't do.
> But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
What would she say if you asked her to install Windows? It doesn't matter. Normal people should either buy preinstalled or ask technical people for help. Using GNU/Linux desktop is as simple as Windows. It will be the same with phones one day, if we push it.
Maybe I should file an issue to update the website then ;)
>fsflover
Username checks out (I kid, I'm also a fan of their work).
Also, if you're using PureOS, what's that like? Have they updated to a debian 13 base yet? Pretty much the only thing stopping me from at least trying it out is the super old version of GNOME
> Also, if you're using PureOS, what's that like?
I gave a couple of links to my reviews in another comment here.
> Have they updated to a debian 13 base yet?
No, but they're advancing, https://forums.puri.sm/t/when-and-how-to-jump-to-crimson/300...
> fan of their work
Thanks!
> What else do you need?
A proper app sandboxing and permissions system?
The parent wasn't speaking of a perfectly secure OS but about "preparing the lifeboats". Also, GNU/Linux somehow sufficiently secure on desktop, especially if you rely on the apps from the FLOSS repos.
I'm considering to switch to your device and start contributing to gnome mobile soon! I'm interested in your experience, what do you like and dislike the most on it?
I wrote a bit here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276516 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39461180
How well do communication apps work on it (Whatsapp, Signal, Discord)? Backups? Media (not as important)?
Increasingly thinking of relegating my iPhone to 2FA and maybe banking only.
> Backups?
Everything that works on desktop GNU/Linux should work on the phone, too. I use Pika Backup app.
> communication
AFAIK none of the apps you listed officially support Linux ARM, so you have to go through some configuration unfortunately. I do not use any of them, I use Matrix.
> Signal
https://forums.puri.sm/t/signal-app-now-usable-in-portrait-m...
https://framapiaf.org/@lolgzs/113010288224110061
> Whatsapp ... Discord
https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-install-whatsapp-and-discord...
https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-web-whatsapp-com-not-worki...
https://source.puri.sm/libremos/tasking/-/issues/1
> Media
Are you talking about watching videos and listening to music? It works fine.
Guess I'll have a look myself soon when I'm ready for some fiddliness. Sounds promising enough.
I need my bank app to run on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216763
I have exactly 0 choice of banks app that would run on a mobile OS that is neither android or google.
At the end of the day, I need a bank account, and access to it, would it only be for buying food, or paying my mortgage.
If you're in Europe, I saw quite a few comments here saying that banks not requiring the duopoly do exist. Otherwise, a dedicated banking phone might be the way.
If mobile Linux runs through the same kind of tortuous adoption and rejection cycle that desktop Linux is still doing, then it's a non starter before it begins.
I've been happily using it on several phones since 2008 (and writing this on one of them right now), only two years shorter than on my desktops/laptops. "Non-starter" is in the eye of the beholder.
> that desktop Linux is still doing
What are you even talking about? My non-technical relatives have been using Debian for many years already.
:) Regrettably, that's not the mass adoption we were all hoping for.
True, SailfishOS :-)
> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions, even Brave is about to do it
Source?
Brave said they'll try to maintain limited support for MV2 for only 4 specific extensions, but recommend Brave Shields as the go-to adblocker for the future. Google is about to remove most of the MV2 code from the codebase, which will explode the complexity soon.
https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
Brave has perverse incentives to discontinue it because of their BAT crypto business model that rewards looking at ads.
Unfortunately even the fully open source Firefox isn't immune to the pressure from the advertising industry, with all their Google funding and their purchase of anonym.
You have no idea how BAT ads work in brave, do you?
I do, but even though they're not in the webpage itself and are as such not affected by the adblocker, brave still has an interest in the advertising industry. Many if not most of their advertising clients would use regular internet ads as well.
have you consider the possibility that... it is just too much work to merge/port the code when upstream is actively breaking them?
Extensions prior to MV3 were notoriously insecure and granted extension developers a very wide attack surface. Assuming that Google only has a sinister reason to switch to a better standard in an ecosystem riddled with ill-intentioned actors is a bit too cynical.
Google will only ever push major updates that are neutral or beneficial to their ad revenue. I do not believe they killed MV3 due to ad blockers, but it's the type of proposal that can survive at Google.
I wouldn't call Android user hostile. What makes most Android phones user hostile is Google Play Services.
I can call Android user hostile. Most Banks and gov apps require play services nowadays, and Google is about to ban app installation outside of their store. Cherry on top, the play store is mostly adware junk. My parents phones are full of adware, bloatware, notification spam, it's almost worse than windows 11.
In your earlier comment you said that deGoogled Android alternatives are what's "slowing us down from leaving Android entirely", but that is not consistent with saying that most banks and government apps require play services.
If these apps cannot run on deGoogled Android, then deGoogled Android cannot be slowing us down from leaving Android because using deGoogled alternatives is as inconvenient for banking and government services as using a non-Android alternative would be.
There are tweaks to enable banking apps on deGoogled Android, but it's an exhausting cat and mouse game. Most of my friends gave up after years of fighting, and now they are back on Google Android because there is no alternative.
so it's the play services. /e/OS has none of these problems except for apps that require original play services. so yeah, those don't work.
interesting tidbit: my bank offers their app from google and from huawei store. it doesn't work on /e/OS however. (but that might also be a /e/OS bug).
this means what we really need is a viable play store alternative. EU regulations could make that happen.
> Every single chrome-fork has shut down MV2 extensions
Ungoogled chromium still supports MV2, and uBlock origin extension works fine.
Yes it's behind a flag, but the removal of MV2 from multiple parts of the codebase is imminent.
>Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
To what?
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
De-Googled Android was/is a truly open platform. Same result. You're pointing out maintenance issues.
How many developers do we have to maintain this or any other platform without pay? That problem applies to a de-Googled fork of Android, or a complete bottom up build of a new platform.
The benefit of using an Android fork is the labor savings on what's already built.
Maintenance is not going away just because we build a new OS.
The day AOSP sources aren't relased, Google will just lose control over Android and it will be managed by a Chinese consortium instead.
8 of the 10 top smartphone manufacturers are Chinese, there's no going back from that.
I think this is a false dichotomy.
Basically what you’re implying is that all the people working on Android derivatives like Lineage, Graphene, and /e/ coming together and working instead on a fully open source OS like a Linux mobile distribution would result in better outcomes and actually get us closer to a daily driveable open source environment phone operating system.
That’s analogous to saying that an automotive tuning shop that puts turbochargers and body kits on Toyota Corollas shouldn’t waste their time, and they should instead design and mass produce their own sports car.
The level of effort difference between AOSP derivatives and a fully open source OS is massive.
You don't have to use Chrome or Chromium.
The irony of this is that when using Firefox to browse to /e/OS url to check for compatible devices:
https://e.foundation/installer/
I get a pop-up telling me that my browser is not compatible, and I should use Edge, Opera or Chrome. See [1]
[1] https://imgur.com/a/al1Q9DM
When I clicked "Browse supported devices" it took me to https://doc.e.foundation/devices
I think it's due to the lack of WebUSB API support in Firefox, it is needed for the web installer, both for eOS and GrapheneOS
As I explained elsewhere in this post, I got to this installer page by clicking on "Check device compatibility" on the https://e.foundation/e-os/ page.
So I was actually expecting a device listing page, not a WebUSB program.
That's a bizarre one. 'You need Chrome' is bad enough, which even the bloody NHS are guilty of, but I always assume that's 'just' an assumption that not Chrome means IE or something, and they haven't woken up even to the proliferation of mobile Safari users.
How is it "bizarre" when it even tells you why it needs a Chromium-based browser?
I didn't know it did, the commenter didn't mention it, and Imgur gave me an overloaded error message. (When it doesn't do that, it usually tells me it's not available in my region or that the image has been deleted anyway.)
Anyway, assuming it's for WebUSB flashing, I agree with other commenters it should just explain that's not available and still give the instructions - bonus points for hiding the unusable WebUSB option.
Yes fortunately we have browser alternatives.
But on mobile, my bank and my government force me to use the Android/iOS duopoly.
How do they do that? I'm not doubting that, it's an honest question. I understand how this works on Apple phones but I don't understand why an identity or attestation service cannot be replaced by another one by the alternative operating system when the hardware is not controlled by Google. Does Google have keys in tamper-proof chips? How else would those banks determine their apps are on the right phone? Or do those apps use Google authentication directly over the Internet, using hard-coded Google public keys?
Depending on the level of security you ask for Play Integrity, it can be:
* is this device rooted, is it an unsigned build ?
* Device is signed, but is it part of the blessed signing keys ? is play services untampered with ?
* Additional checks over the lifetime of the device.
You could fully trust the results of Play Integrity on device, but you can also send the returned token to your server, and your server then contacts play integrity to validate that token. So unless you know how to spoof those encrypted tokens, you won't go very far.
https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview
So basically an alternative OS can offer a service like Play Integrity and the only problem is that those banks hard-code a dependence on Google's Play Integrity and Google has a monopoly for that service?
This is something that could be addressed at least in the EU by mandating banks to allow alternative services or not use this service at all.
Yep. You can even run your own play integrity-like backend.
>This is something that could be addressed at least in the EU by mandating banks to allow alternative services or not use this service at all.
The EU mandates banks to be interoperable, and to guarantee the security of users. You can solve that issue by going through an alternative app that doesn't use play integrity and is PSD2 compliant so other banks let you call their APIs. It usually requires you to be a bank, and as a bank, you're really risk averse. So you use play integrity.
Chrome is just an example. Google stopped pretending Android is a general purpose OS and started cracking down on what is possible without Google’s approval. See developer verification, everything within Google services, etc.
> even Brave is about to do it
Why anyone ever gave that browser a second of trust is beyond be. The damn thing was built on hijacking ad revenue into some imaginary IOU crypto thing, and built by a creep.
Chrome did not crack down on adblockers in Chrome. In fact the chromium team worked together with adblockers on mv3.
>it is impossible to maintain features that complex on a browser
While Chromium is complex, it is modularized which does make it possible for teams to maintain features.
> We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
But currently AOSP is very much open. That's also what the GrapheneOS devs say and why they want to continue using Android. Until it becomes clear that they will completely stop releasing the source code under a free software license i dont see why one should not use Android.
AOSP dev went private, and Google is slower and slower at releasing the source, now twice a year. Worse, many stock apps like the Dialer and Gallery went closed-source years ago.
But the source isn't the point, it's the governance. Just like Chrome, having the source is not enough to guarantee an open platform. Sure you can disable telemetry flags. But you cannot afford to maintain an important feature Google wants to remove, like MV2.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/google-makes-android... https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-qpr1-source-code...
The problem is, if you cannot afford to maintain it, how could you afford to both build AND maintain your own version of it?
I don't think it's true, but ...
"Google built Android to be impossible to maintain without them."
Could be a very genuine answer to that question. Do you really need all of Android? What if you can build a very similar thing at a fraction of the size.
Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.
> But you cannot afford to maintain an important feature Google wants to remove, like MV2.
That depends on who "you" is. Maintaining extensive patch sets is still way cheaper than building and maintaining an entire browser.
I wanted to add a perspective from actual daily use, because a lot of this thread sounds theoretical.
I’ve been using a Murena/Fairphone running /e/OS as my primary phone for a while now, and honestly the experience has been much smoother than I expected. My banking apps work, GPS/navigation works reliably, messaging and everyday apps behave normally — I’m not constantly fighting the device or giving things up. After the initial setup, it just feels like a normal smartphone, except noticeably quieter in terms of tracking and background noise.
What surprised me most is that this isn’t a “privacy experiment” anymore. It’s a usable, stable daily driver. I still get the convenience people worry about losing, but with far fewer ties to Google services by default.
I think a lot of people hesitate because they assume moving away from stock Android means breaking essential apps or living with constant friction. That hasn’t been my experience at all. If you’re curious but unsure, it’s genuinely worth trying — the barrier is much lower than it used to be, and you might find you don’t miss as much as you expect.
This account has three comments on HN, all of them essentially the same type of /e/OS advocacy pablum.
"I wanted to add a perspective from an LLM sockpuppet, because I know you're all not deeply cynical and mistrustful yet."
My account has more comments than that and I share OC's opinion and experience. I've been daily driving /e/ since its FP3 era and lately the experience has been really well polished. Even things that had been "tricky" in the past, like Android auto integration, now work seamlessly.
same here, except for banking apps. the one i am supposed to use now doesn't work.
My banking app doesn't even work on the last 3 android phones I tried because it wants a very up-to-date OS which basically means non-Pixel phones more than 2 years old need not apply.
I had this problem and it turned out to be an upstream issue with MicroG which was eventually patched. If you have an error message you can search for existing issues on /e/OS' gitlab/forum.
Revolut stopped working for me for a while with the error that the bootloader wasn't recognised and rooted phones aren't supported. After about a month an OS update solved it.
As long as banking works with web browsers, I think the future looks good for this usage, but I could de-bank my phone and still have plenty of useful things to do with it.
the problem in my case is that the authentication for the banks website requires an app, and that app doesn't work. i am locked out of online banking for that bank because of it. (they also have a windows app that i could not yet get to work on linux/wine)
Tbh I am using /e/OS as my daily driver and I fully agree, it just works. Bonus points for the Nextcloud integration which I can tie to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance.
I do not understand all the negativity, I think it is a solid alternative in the ecosystem, and choice is a good thing.
I would second their experience, works well for me
so what? Am i supposed to comment on subjects know nothing about ?
It's pretty strange that the only subject you seem to have expertise in is e/os. Over a year and that's the only thing you've felt comfortable in discussing?
I think this is behavior that should be encouraged online. Staying quiet and letting the experts talk to increase the signal to noise ratio is a GOOD thing. OP has hands on experience with something that is at least for now quite niche.
I used to only really speak about node.js topics because that was what I had real fighting experience with, at a scale beyond what most webdevs had ever seen. Those were also my most upvoted posts by far.
I get what you are saying, and if that's what the OP was doing I'd somewhat agree with you.
However, if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to read over their past comments. They all read almost identical to the start of this thread. Before this post they had something like 3 other comments on HN and they were all about how great /e/OS is. All of them have a blurb about the privacy focus of /e/OS. They all read like copy from marketing.
That is bizarre commenting behavior for a niche OS. And these weren't comments about using /e/OS, but rather comments speaking positively about using it.
Your posts on node.js, I assume, weren't all "Node.js is the greatest programming environment I've ever used. It's so smooth and fast." Instead, I'd wager your highly upvoted comments contained useful information about using node.js.
I'd also say, that there are people that work for various software tech companies who post here. The best comments I see almost always start with "Full disclosure, I work for X". Those are far better received.
and so what? should I ask for permission to discuss something? it's crazy how omniscient people are aggressive on the internet. Is that your normal behaviour IRL??
It's funny how your sentences were perfectly capitalized an hour ago, and now your Shift key has become flaky.
Good stuff! This feels very human. How do you feel about Murena? I feel like like they're very much a "Next Gen" privacy tech company. I've also heard they're crowd-funding!?
> and so what?
This is behavior of an astroturfer, that's so what. Which is why you are being accused of that. It looks suspicious.
> should I ask for permission to discuss something?
Nope, the opposite. If you want to look like a non-astroturfer then engagement with other topics on the site would do that.
If you only engage with a single topic over the years and the only thing you contribute is "This is the absolute best working OS I've used, everyone should use it. I endorse it fully". People are going to be, understandably, suspicious of your motivations.
> it's crazy how omniscient people are aggressive on the internet.
We live in an internet filled with advertisements. Most of us have seen astroturfing. That's why we suspect you.
> Is that your normal behaviour IRL??
Absolutely it is! If someone knocks on my door telling me about the wonders of pest control, you'll forgive me for not taking their endorsement for the program they are selling as being solid. Same thing happens in churches. I'm instantly suspicious of someone that starts singing the praises of a product in church and, magically, starts hosting parties where they talk about the wonders of said product (see MLM).
This is a fact of living in a capitalist society. There's always an incentive to sell which makes everyone suspicious of product endorsements. Especially when that seems to be the only thing a person is capable of doing.
I have used /e/OS for years and it's been good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can vouch for your experience as mine has been the same, also on a Fairphone on which I installed /e/OS. I could have literally written the same comment myself — em-dash usage included!
It's not just an OS, it's an /e/OS.
Yeah, it's an OS that gives a browser error because it thinks the name is a path.
Yes, their choice of name was not their greatest achievement.
it was supposed to be a temporary name, that i believe was intentionally chosen to be bad to make it easier to replace later. they were under pressure because the original name eelo had a trademark issue.
when they eventually found a new name "murena" it appears they then decided to use it as a brand for the phones that they themselves sell instead, keeping /e/OS as the name for the operating system
What is their connection with eels?
I just checked and Murena is an eel, too. Imho, one of the ugliest fish one could choose as a mascotte :S
heh, i never made the connection. it's spelled muraena but that's as close as eelo is to eel.
curiously i always thought morays look cute.
Yeah, it makes searching for bug reports/help rather troublesome
This is an astroturfing account.
It is weird they only discuss e/os. Does look like it.
Astroturfing kills any trust I had in e/OS.
I too have used Fairphone + /e/OS for years and have had literally zero issues with it.
The irony of advertising a privacy-enabled de-googled system, and then telling me that my Firefox browser is not support, and that I should use Edge, Opera or Chrome instead....
Browsing:
https://e.foundation/installer/
Reply:
https://imgur.com/a/al1Q9DM
This is related to Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher and the scope of what it can do should be limited. As such, it should not be allowed to e.g. control peripherals like the USB devices.
Which is in my opinion a fairly reasonable take.
But given the current situation, I would assume that the companies providing WebUSB tools like installers would also spend a few moments to create e.g. a Python script that would do the same thing but locally. So that anyone unwilling to use WebUSB within their browser can have a vetted and transparent way to get the same thing done.
> Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher
No, it's security concern.
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100
And, to counter the arguments that "the site tells you that you need WebUSB support": you get to the https://e.foundation/installer/ when you click "Check device compatibility" on the main page. Personally, I'd expect either a check that works in any browser or a simple compatible device list. Why would I need a special browser just to check if I can use this OS?
This is especially strange considering they have the list of supported devices in their docs https://doc.e.foundation/devices
So I think the issue is that the button on the main page is poorly named
What I currently see:
main page -> download and try! -> browse supported devices
lands on https://doc.e.foundation/devices which is a list of models, while
main page -> download and try! -> check device compatibility
lands on https://e.foundation/installer/ the chromium-only webusb page. It could be a better page; instead of showing a scary "navigator not suppored" modal demanding you install a particular browser, it could say the automated compatibility tester requires one of these browsers and your phone plugged in with USB, otherwise here's the device finder page
Hmmm, It seems to require the WebUSB API: https://caniuse.com/?search=webusb
If the site can detect that it can't use WebUSB, it can give you instructions on how to download and flash the mobile OS, not tell you to fuck off.
Compare: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/tokay/
That's not an installer, that's a device page.
It's the specific functionality needed here that Firefox lacks that makes the /e/ page show the warning, unlike the lineage page that does not have the problem in the first place.
The fun part is that I got to this installer page by clicking on "Check device compatibility" on the https://e.foundation/e-os/ page..
So I was actually expecting a device page, not a WebUSB program..
Okay, that makes your complaint very understandable.
Absolutely. This is handled very badly, and I was also surprised about the bad UX on that screen.
same for grapheneos. only difference maybe that you can choose to also manually install it without WebUSB
There's absolutely no reason to use /e/ when GrapheneOS exists.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
But GrapheneOS doesn't exist. It works only on a few devices created by Google, so their claim of being degoogled is a bit funny.
Google's hardware is just hardware. It is not locked down like the hardware of many other manufacturers. Moreover, it's the only such hardware which also allows you, the user, to lock it down for your own security. GrapheneOS is not just focused around avoiding Google, it's more accurately focused around security and user choice.
The goal is to give you the option to avoid needing to rely on Google's spying or services while not having to compromise on security.
None of these other solutions regularly get included in Celebrite's documentation as being an explicit benchmark of their software's ability to break into phones. And that's almost certainly due to the fact that unless you leverage hardware security features like what GrapheneOS (and stock Android on a Pixel, and iOS on an iPhone) utilises, you have no chance of going against any actual adversaries.
And I'm not just talking about state actors here, even drive-by opportunistic attacks are likelier on a random other phone running some other Android build.
So yeah, you are running Google hardware, that doesn't make you "googled". It's just a sad reflection on the reality of the hardware landscape. If you want the same security as what GrapheneOS offers, you will currently need to use a Pixel.
I'd be curious to see what comes out of their Motorola partnership though.
A large part of "degoogling" to me means "stop giving google money" and "cut off Google entirely from my life".
If I have to give Google a lot of money every 4-6 years to remain "de-googled" then I never was.
Why are we degoogling, for what purpose? I couldn't care less about giving them what likely amounts to ~10€ of margin per year on the hardware sale. What I care about is not giving them data which is worth a lot more than that, and to take back control over my device.
When you go with an alternative you lose superior privacy and security offered by GrapheneOS and you just end up leaking more data back to Google and other ad-tech companies than you would otherwise, negating any benefits several times over.
See: Advanced features, degoogling, privacy, security, and updates sections of https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
You can buy used Pixel, effectively not giving money to Google, or buy a Motorola when their GOS phone is released
I don't think Google makes a lot of profit on Pixel phones.
The real profit comes from their advertising business.
Maybe the phones are even subsidized by the ad business.
Thats a very binary way of looking at this.
I think it’s very valid. I want to be hardware-independent, not only OS independent. I need graphene to work on a fairphone, jolla phone or whatever other alternatives there are. E/os can do that (to an extent), Graphene can’t for probably very good reason, but still: It‘s not an alternative then.
But true.
I must agree, you are right, GOS is only on Pixel phones.
But we have to keep in mind that /e/ has a lot of problems, the only one solved is sending data to Google. The security aspect of the OS is problematic and some key elements of a privacy seem questioning (AI integration, commercial collaborations, ...).
Fix: IA => AI typo and various English errors.
Like what problems? I am using /e/ daily for myself and my family, and it's working like a charm.
Uploading speech-to-text to OpenAI? Regular communication with Google? Using Google for assisted GPS? Giving a bunch of Google apps privileged access (if you need them for e.g. Android Auto)?
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-...
https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/GmsCore/-/blob/a9e102567518...
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/e-os-betrays-users-privacy-ope...
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
Well and besides that only shipping ASBs and no other security updates outside major Android releases (and both usually late). Using heavily outdated kernel trees (e.g. FP4 is using a Linux kernel patch level that hasn't been updated since 2020!), outdated vendor firmware blobs, etc.
It might work, but it is not very secure, nor very private.
The OS is working well, but have privacy and security concerns. Is it better than a stock OS? I don't know, maybe, maybe not, it depends on the stock OS.
What IA?
/e/OS speech to text uploads your speech to OpenAI. (I think IA was a typo.)
Yeah, it's a typo (I'm french speaking, AI is IA in french and sometime I type it in french instead of english).
Ugh. Thanks. Hard pass here.
Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.
I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.
Literally announced today partnership with Motorola to bring it to their devices.
/e/OS is Android, meaning it's still critically dependent on goodwill of Google to continue releasing their work as part of AOSP.
So if you're trying to be a silly purist, then /e/OS doesn't fit either. If you're not, getting a Pixel will significantly enhance your safety since they're better supported for security patches and better designed in hardware when it comes to security.
> /e/OS is Android
So is GrapheneOS
Let's explore this a little further.
I think it is legitimate to be a purist about smartphones, but I don't think the GP is. So, let's talk about the non-purist situation: Users like us want to de-google. But we are not willing to make all of the sacrifices that purists do. The question is then, what can we use (and - what projects can we support financially).
Now, we can use GrapheneOS if we have Google Pixel's. But - most people don't have those phones, for any number of reasons. One of them is price, by the way: You can get a decent smartphone for under 100 USD and even a half-decent one for 70 USD. And most people in the world are not in an economic situation where you can tell them "shell out 300 USD and buy a Google Pixel".
Moreover - suggesting we strengthen our ties to Google in order to de-Google is fundamentally problematic. Even if we're not going all the way, we are striving to distance ourselves from them.
So, an imperfect software solution for a wider selection of phones does sound quite useful. Change my mind! :-)
Where are those decent under 100 USD unlockable smartphones?
suggesting we strengthen our ties to Google in order to de-Google is fundamentally problematic
You may have seen that they are working with Motorola to release GrapheneOS-capable phones.
GOS is degoogled in all the ways that I care about - it's about the data they can gather. Among all the smartphone options that I consider usable day to day (leaving only Android and iOS at the moment), GOS is the most private and secure.
> their claim of being degoogled is a bit funny.
I don't think they use this term anywhere.
It also now works on Motorola devices, it's on my HN feed literally right above this post.
I have no idea where you got this information - the HN post is about partnership. It does not work on Motorola devices, at least not yet [1].
[1] https://grapheneos.org/releases
It doesn't "now work"; it may work on a future Motorola device that doesn't exist yet.
It doesn't yet work on Motorola devices.
It is going to become available on selected Motorola devices at some point in the future.
> It also now works on Motorola devices, it's on my HN feed literally right above this post.
Did you read the article you mentioned? There's not yet a single non-Google device that can run GrapheneOS.
The post about Graphene partnering with Motorola is right about this one, currently, (Lenovo bought Motorola from Google in 2014.), so that point will no longer be valid as soon as they ship something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214645
Not everything have to be perfect.
For some user, /e/ is more approachable (Friendly and colorful UI)
I could not get my mother to use GrapheneOS, /e/ is a lot simpler.
Still miles better than to use a Default ROM from most OEM.
Exactly!
If you can use GrapheneOS, good for you but what /e/OS offers is:
- Usable Android with your usual Android app (banking, etc) - No data sent to Google by default - Easier interface with nearly no bloatware - Available easily on many smartphones, including older ones - Extending the life of some smartphones
The price to pay is:
- Some Murena cloud bloatware - Android security patches are sometimes delayed - Security is not on par with GrapheneOS
If your main concern is protecting your privacy from Google and extending the life of your smartphone without breaking a sweat, /e/OS is probably the best option.
If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats, then GrapheneOS might be better.
/e/OS works really great for non-techie users. I’ve done it in my family.
"If you can use GrapheneOS"
GrapheneOS is just another OS. It's no less usable than /e/ and it is no more difficult to get a phone with it than /e/. You can purchase both preinstalled.
I have phones with both, but I don't necessarily agree that /e/OS is easier. E.g. things like doing or restoring in-app purchases often do not work, even when logging in through microG. Want that nice backup option that Signal is now offering? Well, good luck, you cannot purchase it on /e/OS (at least I couldn't). In general when it comes to compatibility, my experience is that GrapheneOS is better because it can use real Google Play Services, albeit sandboxed. I think you can use the Play Store on /e/OS as well, but it's going to have higher privileges.
No data sent to Google by default
Not true. /e/OS does send data to Google by default: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-...
They also use Google for assisted GPS when you use it, eSIM provisioning, widevine provisioning. Last time I checked, microG on /e/OS also downloads a Google binary blob for SafetyNet.
Besides analytics, if you install Google Apps (e.g. for Android Auto), many of them get higher privileges on /e/OS.
The price to pay is:
I would also add installing F-Droid apps (if you use App Lounge) through 'CleanAPK', without wanting to reveal why this is necessary or who owns/maintains CleanAPK.
They do quite a lot of fishy stuff. It may be incompetence, but yeah...
If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats
This always sounds like systems like GrapheneOS are for paranoid people. But this is basically you if you ever go to a demonstration (e.g. in the US) or cross borders of certain countries (e.g. of the US), sadly things like Cellebrite have become very common. Then suddenly layered protection, not running years behind in security patches, a duress pin, or rebooting after not unlocking for a few minutes to get back to BFU aren't so bad. (IANAL, figure out yourself which of these are legal and not destruction of evidence.)
I find it interesting that there are so many comments that are saying "Don't use this one use this one it's better!"
But what I think a lot of people are missing is what you exactly just touched on. We have options! That's a good thing. Yeah, some options are not as good as others if you wanna optimize for X. Then don't use that option! Use the option that works for you.
To me, the fact that alternatives exist on varying spectra of "degoogle-fication" is a win in my book. The fact that we're able to talk about and recommend so many alternatives is a good thing.
Same story. Also with my mother :D
There absolutely is when your concern is not only moving away from Google but also using sustainable hardware like Fairphone, which GrapheneOS doesn't support afaik.
Even on non-pixel devices, unless you really want to use the /e/ "ecosystem, there are probably better options like LineageOS for microG iodéOS.
(/e/ used to be heavily based on an outdated version of LineageOS for microG. I'm not sure what the current state is after I settled on second-hand pixel with graphene)
iodé is available for my device as well, but it looked fairly similar to /e/OS to me (and the latter has an official partnership with my phone's manufacturer). What makes it a better option - should I switch?
When I looked into it, /e/ constantly used to be many months late with security updates. LineageOS for microg and iodé were much quicker (~ 1 month max which is still not that great).
Hmm, possibly I'm looking in the wrong place, but as far as I can remember, I've been getting new /e/OS versions about every month, and looking at the release notes [1], they usually seem to include the latest "Android security patches", which I assume is what's relevant - unless there's something else that should also be included?
[1] https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/releases/-/releases
Yes, seems like they got it down to ~2 weeks, goo! Good to know, that should be on par with Lineageos.
Unless you own some obscure phone that is not supported by GOS, Calyx or Iode, but is by /e/... Not sure how many of those exist...
There is when you have a phone that isn't a pixel.
is "/e/ supports my phone while graphene only supports google pixels" not a good reason?
And even if GOS doesn't support your device (due to minimum security requirements) why not use upstream LineageOS?
Because upstream LineageOS doesn't support microg out of the box. You can install it but it needs signature spoofing to pass Google's SafetyNet garbage. Bonus point for some roms that allow you to relock the bootloader after the install (iodéOS, CalyxOS).
Lineageos supports signature spoofing for microG these days! It did take them a long time to come around but they did in the end.
/e/OS also supports locked bootloaders for devices that have official builds (a smaller subset than the ones with community builds)
I can't check my device compatibility without Chrome or edge. Is there a reason I can't just see a list of compatible devices to confirm (as I suspect) that it won't work on my phone?
Yeah, not a fan of having to plug my phone in for detection.... That page should at least include a link here: https://doc.e.foundation/devices
Looks cool, but burns a bit of credibility by ripping off Apple's icon designs.
There has to be some fresh-out-of-college graphic designer in Berlin ready to make their name by designing a custom icon library for a project like this, ask around.
Well E/OS is mainly about privacy. And about getting rid of Google. And it works. To me that's more important and it's a better vision.
I you ever cross a border or attend a demonstration, privacy requires security. Unfortunately, /e/OS (and most hardware) is severely lacking in that department.
Why? Care to elaborate?
I'm currently looking for a new Android phone. I don't like the Pixel and deep integration with Google. I looked at the Fairphone with /e/OS and the Pixel with GrapheneOS, but unfortunately there's no certainty that everything will work or where the boundary is between Google Android and "clean" Android. For example, it turned out that Android Auto is essentially Google Auto and I don't what find out what is dependent on Google. I want something that just works. A phone isn't something I want to tinker with like Linux ten years ago. So basically the choice comes down to Samsung and Chinese brands.
Pixel's "deep integration with Google" is in the OS, so if you replace the OS with GrapheneOS, there is no deep integration anymore.
Yes, but I made an argument about /e/OS and GrapheneOS. You never knows what will work or stop working.
Motorola just made a deal with GrapheneOS, so I'd vager they're going to be around for longer on that basis alone.
Sure, but I was only responding to the reservation you expressed about Pixel: "I don't like the Pixel and deep integration with Google."
GrapheneOS has sandboxed Google Play, which allows using most Google services (including Android Auto) while limiting their deep OS access.
As an average user, I don't understand all the ins and outs of an Android system, but I'm very happy to use /e/OS on my Fairphone 4 every day. I don't have a Google account, but I can still use all the apps I need, including French banking apps (CMB, Endenred+).
My only regret is that the simplified installation tool didn't work (my FP4 kept restarting), so I had to install it manually, which makes it inaccessible to users who are even less tech-savvy than me.
Finally, I still think it's an excellent alternative to Android, but we need to go further and allow our smartphones to work with other operating systems, particularly Linux. I am hopeful that one day we will have a Linux OS for our smartphones that performs as well as /e/OS (I have heard about Jolla smartphones and Sailfish OS, but unfortunately I have not tested them).
PostmarketOS is a complete degoogled mobile ecosystem, actually. How about we commit resources into that?
What advantages does /e/OS offer over installing LineageOS without Gapps, which is a necessary step you must explicitly take if you want them?
Honestly, I don't quite understand this.
I get the appeal of degoogling, but this seems to just be replacing that with alternatives run by another commercial company, just one I've never heard of before.
Why does it even need "One account for your privacy" ... "Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the centre of the ecosystem" when it'd be even better to have everything on-device without an account at all.
Even more, Murena seems to be owned by Qwant who seem to be in the business of selling a search engine, and while they currently claim to be all about user privacy, this is basically exactly how Google started nearly 30 years ago.
I wonder if they'd be happy if, for instance, somebody took this system and debundled Murena and switched it to using duckduckgo. Would they embrace that too, or sue them into oblivion?
EDIT: maybe I was too hasty. I've just seen that it's open source and it seems like you can self-host the required cloud parts: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/infra/ecloud-selfhosting
Even more, Murena seems to be owned by Qwant
Source? (would be interesting if it was)
I think I was wrong. Googling suggest that Qwant is owned by Octave Klaba, the founder and majority owner of OVH. Murena seems to be owned by Gaël Duval.
It's just from their website a lot of mentions of Murena seemed to say powered by Qwant, or similar, and so it looked like they were closely linked.
I have both a Jolla C2 phone, and an E/Os device, on a nothing CMS1 phone. Both are great. I like the Jolla Phone for its SailfishOS, which has great UI/Ux. I am less enthusiastic about the hardware. (good enough though) The E/OS really is good, all apps work good, and really much is done for privacy protection. But if the hardware is more performant, and with a few extra features i'd still opt for SailfishOS
https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder
I worked at Google before, so I trust Google more than these random organizations that claim they are better than Google at handling sensitive info.
That is all nice and well, but Google is primarily an advertisement business. A huge corporation that gained enormous power that operates only to satisfy its own self interest. So that gives us non-Googlers more to think about than just that consideration to take into account.
It is an entirely realistic scenario which afaik data backs up that most people don't change their default privacy related settings which Google profits from, but in case of actually setting their provided privacy settings ON, they do work.
What do you mean by "better [...] at handling sensitive info"? As in, they are more technically competent, or they will treat your data more ethically?
I don't think these projects claim they've got better infrastructure for handling private data, just that they won't sell it to advertisers. I trust Google are experts at handling my data, I just don't want them to.
Better at siphoning out all the sensitive info, maybe.
On the other hand, I would trust a randomly chosen organization more than the world's largest adtech firm.
Got a "Your browser is not supported" error for using Firefox on their website (device compatibility page).
Very poor first impression.
The installer page requires WebUSB which Firefox wont support. There are a list of supported devices here: https://doc.e.foundation/devices
If you block Google, as much of it as possible anyway, on your firewall, does the device work/install? I tried /e/ and Lineage about a year ago, but neither of them worked when Google was blocked completely. The only one that made no requests to Google was Graphene.
> open-source means auditable privacy
This is what that auditing actually reveals:
* /e/OS sends user speech data to OpenAI without consent [1], and thought this was ok until they got caught [2].
* /e/OS massively delays security patches, and calls this a "standard industry practice" [3]. Meanwhile, GrapheneOS' opt-in security preview releases provide early access to security updates prior to official disclosure [4]. Also see [0] (Security update speed) and [7] (WebView being 40 security updates behind).
* microG downloads and executes proprietary Google binaries in a privileged environment [5] [6]. You can obviously not audit these, nor should this count as "degoogled".
* microG still phones home to Google by default (android.clients.google.com for device registration check-in, mtalk.google.com for FCM push, firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com for SIM activations) [7].
[0] has a comparison of popular privacy and security-focused Android-based OS, which paints the whole picture. Privacy-friendly does not necessarily mean secure, but in this case "privacy-friendly" is quite a stretch already.
[0] https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114880528716479708
[2] https://community.e.foundation/t/clarification-about-voice-t...
[3] https://community.e.foundation/t/e-os-and-security-updates/7...
[4] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...
[5] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/blob/e19a9985204ec8329c1d9...
[6] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/blob/e19a9985204ec8329c1d9...
[7] https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-...
And they give privileged access to a bunch of Google apps if you need them for e.g. Android Auto:
https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/GmsCore/-/blob/a9e102567518...
My phone (Teracube) is running /e/OS now for 2 years. Nearly everything works out of the box (bank apps, e-identity apps etc ..). The only issue I have is that the app I use to take contactless payment on the phone via NFC does not work (while it works using Android).
For how polished the launcher looks, it's a bit jarring to install /e/ and realize that under the hood, all the apps are just running a very stock Material theme. I'm not shaming the developers; developing a custom theme is no doubt an involved task that they don't have the resources for.
I have been using e/OS but moved away when an upgrade to the next version required to manually wipe the device. I could cope with the little inconveniences of a degoogled phone, but wiping the device myself following a unclear procedure was too much for me. My phone is not a hacking subject. It's a tool. Still, it worked reasonably well and I would have upgraded and kept using it if the upgrade had been easier.
I am on e/OS since 2021 with a FP3 and, for what is worth, I never had to reinstall, wipe or anything. My phone just had it's 5th birthday and it has been a single continuous set of updates.
I know the versions differ by model, so perhaps your model was not as well supported.
It was the gigaset gs190. I've used it quite some time with e/os, but one day the automatic updates stopped working and I discovered this reinstallation requirement.
I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
>Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the centre of the ecosystem, allowing to store, back up and retrieve your data safely on remote servers.
This sounds like their version is somewhat married to Murena. While probably better than Google, still not independent.
They're also advertising features such as "hiding your IP address [...] when you feel like it" – which sounds a lot like a VPN – without mentioning much about who the traffic is going through or how they might log it.
> I wonder how this compares to GrapheneOS in practice.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm is a fairly complete comparison. One of GrapheneOS' biggest features is that they sandbox Google services (if you choose to install them), whereas e/OS gives them privileged access by default (via microG). Calling it a "degoogled" OS while microG uses Google's proprietary blobs is... a choice.
The GrapheneOS developers are very sceptical of e/OS (https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=e/os), but you should obviously take biases into account here. Murena's CEO occasionally participates too: https://xcancel.com/gael_duval/search?f=tweets&q=grapheneos
I'm on /e/OS and don't use Murena Workspace (which I think is just a Nextcloud instance that they host). For the past couple of years in which I've used it, I have felt zero pressure to use Murena Workspace. Though I imagine it might be neat if you host your own Nextcloud instance, which might be nicely integrated too.
(That said, yes, I don't quite trust their VPN or app store, since it's unclear who's running it - in the latter's case, I imagine that's also a legal matter.)
Yeah it really looks like they are trying to solve too many things.
This is usually not a good sign.
I'd prefer to have an OS provider that does one thing well.
The hide your ip address feature routes your traffic through Tor: https://doc.e.foundation/support-topics/advanced_privacy#hid...
You can do this on any other android device using an app like Orbot or Tor VPN beta
So we replace an OS owned by a search engine (Google) with an OS owned by a search engine (Murena)? You're going to need to give me more details than that before I consider switching.
I'm an /e/OS user with a Murena account and I had never even heard of Murena being "a search engine". After searching (on DDG), I see that they in June 2025 they launched a collaboration with the Qwant search engine to launch a Murena-branded version: https://murena.com/discover-murena-find-your-new-privacy-fir...
That does not make it "an OS owned by a search engine".
Also, Qwant ain't bad. I've been using it for about a year.
I've long been a fan of murena. I would likely be using their services if I hadn't discovered disroot :)
Why rip off Apple design so much here (see homescreen image). Seems like a lot of unnecessary effort. Plus it’s not done well enough so instead of looking like itself, it looks like a bad ripoff.
Why is this a complete graphical clone of (old version) iOS?
This seems like the worst of both worlds.
How is the experience in practice? What works, what doesn't? Are updates prompt and regular?
Overall, everything works pretty well for me (user for multiple years), except all apps which are too bound too Google Play Services as microG is not stubbing/implementing all APIs.
So all apps with premium subscription you can only handle through in-app purchase, usually won't work.
I've heard that some banking apps are not working correctly either as not "secured" enough device, in my personal experience, they all worked, it's really a case-by-case logics here.
For the upgrade, OTA upgrade around every month, and it has always worked smoothly
I don't like names that are difficult to google.
But then again, maybe that's the point :)
But can't relock the bootloader on a Pixel 9 since it is "community supported" :(
Not that it matters but I just noticed certain titles on their website can be edited. For example the text "Use our /e/OS Installer" can be modified and I noticed it because I accidentally pasted my clipboard there. I suppose contenteditable should be set to "false".
fuck me i'm doing work even though i should be working right now
Sir, you just made the world a better place, thank you.
why is there not any support for latest models of manufacturers, as older models are not for sale now.
Is this DOA if major OEMs like Motorola partner with a project like GrapheneOS? https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...
At the link, I see a lot of text about a company called Murena. Including:
> Operated by Murena, your Murena Workspace account @murena.io is at the > centre of the ecosystem, allowing to store, back up and retrieve your > data safely on remote servers.
That seems to suggest that we would be replacing one large overbearing corporation with a smaller and less-evil overbearing corporation. Is e/OS an open-source facade for Murena?
Nice, but....
> a unique privacy enhanced environment.
... consider proofreading.
The timing of this post right below the Motorola/GrapheneOS partnership is pretty funny.
I've been running /e/OS on a Fairphone for about a year now. The experience is... fine. Not great. App compatibility is the main pain point. Banking apps are hit or miss even with microG. Updates lag behind GrapheneOS significantly.
The Murena cloud stuff is the part that bothers me most. You're trading one cloud dependency for another. At least with GrapheneOS you get a clean slate and can choose your own sync solution (Nextcloud, whatever).
That said, /e/ supports way more devices than GrapheneOS does. For people who can't or won't buy a Pixel (or now Motorola), it's one of the few options. The real question is whether the Motorola partnership changes the calculus. If GrapheneOS gets proper OEM support, the device limitation argument mostly goes away.
> Updates lag behind GrapheneOS significantly.
You might be right but there are new /e/OS releases every month, that's enough for me: https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/releases/-/releases