Fairphone 5 + Murena /e/OS review, part 2: the OS
A suffering-free smartphone with a spy-free operating system sounds too good to be true. I decided to see if that was the case by buying a Fairphone 5 with Murena's /e/OS pre-installed.
Like it or not, the smartphone is an intrinsic part of our lives and it's no big secret that the average phone is terrible for human welfare and our privacy. Two companies however have taken it upon themselves to try and change that reality. In part 1 of this post I talked about what I think of the Fairphone 5. In part 2, I'm going to take a look at the operating system, /e/OS.
Searching for privacy
My previous phone was a Pixel 2 and I'd been looking for a more privacy focussed and non-Google mobile OS for a while. I briefly considered GrapheneOS[↗] but they didn't support Pixels as old as mine and to use them would also require buying a new phone from Google. I also came across a thread on Mastodon in which the dev of GrapheneOS was being condescending about people considering other OS's and it put me off.
By chance I later came across a post on Hacker News about /e/OS[↗] and de-Googled operating systems. This piqued my interest and when I discovered that I could not only get the OS pre-installed, but also on the newly released human and environmentally friendly Fairphone 5, I was sold.
Murena and the e Foundation
I bought my Fairphone with /e/OS through Murena[↗]. Murena is a privately-owned business geared toward privacy and sustainability[↗]. They design their own hardware and invest in that of other like-minded businesses like Fairphone. When it comes to software their focus is on using open-source and sustainable projects (such as /e/OS), and they have also created their own privacy-oriented cloud services.
All of this was music to my ears but I had one lingering doubt: if the company selling products with /e/OS was privately owned (however idealistic), what would that mean for the future of /e/OS if, for example, Murena were to come into some Venture Capital money?
Fortunately inbetween Murena and /e/OS sits the e Foundation[↗]. This is a non-profit setup purely to maintain /e/OS by hosting it's assets and coordinating the expertise needed to keep it up and running.
Having done my background research into the owners of /e/OS, I then moved on to investigating the operating system itself.
De-Googled
/e/OS is a fork of Android with everything Google-related replaced or contained. Instead of Google services they use microG[↗] which allows installing Google Play Store apps without using Google itself.
All the standard cloud services provided by Google have replacements (although I use Proton for most things, so I haven't made use of the Murena services). /e/OS also comes with some default apps that cover the basic requirements of a modern smartphone like an e-mail client, web browser, notes app and calendar.
Installing new apps is done through /e/OS' App Lounge which seamlessly combines Google Play Store and F-Droid into one interface. Searching for a video player for example shows NewPipe and YouTube next to each other. Perhaps the elitists will be disappointed by this, but I feel this is mostly /e/OS being realistic about the state of the world - Big Tech apps are (currently) largely unavoidable, especially if you work an office job.
Privacy focussed
Probably the biggest plus point of the OS for me is /e/OS' Advanced Privacy feature. This built-in application blocks all third-party tracking attempts from all installed apps, including the browser. Opening it I can see that, for example, my weather app uses 4 trackers: Google AdMob, Google Firebase Analytics, PubMatic and pubmatic.com. Advanced Privacy tells me it has blocked 4,871 potential leaks since I installed the weather app (which, staggeringly, is about 100 times more than WhatsApp, an app that I use almost hourly).
Crucially Advanced Privacy also gives the option to enable all trackers for an app or each of the trackers individually. This can be useful because /e/OS errs on the side of caution in a lot of instances. That can result in things breaking within certain apps, such as the gif search function in WhatsApp (because it tries to make a request to GIPHY Analytics). Personally I prefer to sarifice a little bit of functionality to keep my privacy, but it's reassuring to know that the choice is there if something really becomes unusable.
Open-source
The final thing to note about /e/OS is that it's an open-source project and therefore affected by everything that comes with that. Updates and bug fixes can be slow as the team is essentially made up of volunteers and community members. They also have to support a range of handsets so a bug that's only affecting the Fairphone 5 specifically is unlikely to get as much priority as one affecting multiple phones.
I've had a bug with my phone since I got it where the launcher will occasionally crash and restart when the App Lounge checks for new app updates. I know this is the cause because it always happens right before I get a notification telling me that there are app updates available. In order to prevent it from happening too often I turned off automatic checking for app updates in the settings and set the checking frequency to once a month. Despite this it still happens ever so often. The team is aware of the bug and even pushed a fix recently which significantly reduced how often it occurred (but didn't eliminate it completely), but as it only happens to Fairphones, fixes are a long time coming.
Conclusion
Ultimately the choice of whether /e/OS is right for you comes down to a few basic choices: how concerned are you about your privacy, how important do you find free, open-source software and how much are you willing to sacrifice to stay true to those ideals?
Because while /e/OS does it's best, it will obviously never truly be able to compete with multi-million dollar companies like Google and Apple who can easily spend hundreds of manhours smoothing out the rough edges of their software.
But on the other hand, Google and Apple have all that money (at least partially) due to gathering information about their users. By buying their products and using their operating systems, you're supporting those practicies. By token of the fact that you're reading this post, I assume that that is not something you're happy about.
At the end of the day /e/OS is as much a statement as it is a piece of software. It's contributing to a new option, a better way. Proof that perhaps we aren't all heading towards a dystopian cyberpunk future dominated by corporations who own everything. A statement that perhaps the same grassroots activism that exists in the world of desktop operating systems can also exist on mobile.
For me, /e/OS is ideal. It's absolutely usable for all my daily needs, offering all the apps I'm used to with more private alternatives. It's fast and fluid, easy to understand and navigate, and crucially doesn't suffer from a lot of the pitfalls of open-source software such as broken updates or failures to boot (unlike some other Linux distros...). I look forward to seeing where the e Foundation takes /e/OS and hope for a sizeable increase in their market share.