Android without Google: the Murena -  /e/ Project blew me away!

Hey guys, this is Nick and welcome to my Linux experiment. You guys know I've been trying to de-google my life and there are still two main roadblocks, YouTube and Android. On the YouTube front, no real news there, but on the Android front, I might just have found the Android phone that is not really running Android solution. So let's take a look at the eProject and how it amazed me. Okay, let's start with a small disclaimer first. I am not sponsored by the eProject, but they did send me this phone to try out. It's a Galaxy S9+, and I didn't have to pay anything for it, but I do have to send it back afterwards and I have not been paid to make this video. This also won't be a full-on review of the eOperating System. I'll go into detail on what I liked, what I didn't, what the project is trying to accomplish, and I also got some answers from Gaël Duval, which is the creator and main member of this project and community, so I'll spring on them here and there, but in the end, there's just not enough time to review a full mobile OS in a 10 to 15 minute video. So what is e? Well, the eProject is an open-source and non-profit project backed by the eFoundation. Their main goal is to provide a completely de-googled version of Android based on the AOSP version of Android, and they have taken de-googling to the strictest sense of the word. They have plucked out every single bit that Google might have left out in the AOSP version of Android. There is no time server, there is no Google Play Store, no default applications, no Google services. They have taken all of these out and replaced them with their own implementations, which are surprisingly good. So as Gaël Duval puts it, their main goal is to provide a more ethical mobile operating system. As Google and Apple has a complete duopoly on the mobile smartphone market, they collect data every single day on whatever you do. On iOS, this data collection is 6 megabytes per day, and on Android it's 12. So these operating systems are always trying to grab your data and do something with it. Google sells it to advertisers, Apple uses it to improve or modify their projects, or just know what their users are doing. Whatever the purpose of this data collection is, the e-team thinks it is unacceptable and that it has too many bad potential consequences for freedom and for democracy. And as such, they want to provide an alternative that doesn't collect data as much as it can. The e-operating system is the result. This is a system that you can install on a wide range of Android smartphones, also not the really newest smartphones, and you can also order a refurbished phone with the e-project pre-installed on it. More recently, you can also buy a Fairphone 3 running the e-project right off from the e-shop. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus that they send me is running the e-operating system by default, and that's something that you could, for example, buy refurbished from their store. Now obviously, not all Android smartphones are supported at the moment. There is a fairly wide selection from manufacturers and models, but the e-project cannot just add the drivers for every single phone. But the community can get involved. As it's an open-source community project, there is nothing stopping the community members from implementing whatever is needed to make another phone work. Gael also told me that the Pine phone might be in the works at some point in the future, and they already have ports that also support laptops, including the Pinebook. The main problem with installing your own OS or flashing a ROM on an Android smartphone is that it can be a daunting task for a beginner. That's why the e-project has started working on their own simple installer, which would recognize the device, the model, and help you install the e-project in a few clicks, instead of having to use command line utilities, flashing ROMs, unlocking bootloaders. They'll just guide you through the whole process, and the installer is still in beta. As soon as it is released, I will probably take a look at it. Now let's talk a little bit about the e-account. Now, the team is conscious that when you buy a Google phone or an Android phone, you get a whole load of services just by creating a Google account. The team wants to replicate some of that functionality by allowing you to create an e-account. This account basically gives you a user account on the e-project's NextCloud, and you get mail, contacts, tasks, calendar, photosync, gallery, basically all the default features of a NextCloud instance. This account is free and gives you access to 1 gigabyte of storage space. That is not much, but sponsors of the e-project that gives them $99 or more can have access to 20 gigabytes. That's still not a huge deal, but it's on par with the pricing of most companies like Apple or Samsung if you want to buy some drive space online. Now, in terms of features, the e-team is not stopping at what NextCloud provides. They are also working on end-to-end encryption, SMS backup and restore, the ability to log periodically your location so if your phone or device gets stolen, you know where it was, and they are also working on the ability for you to host your own e-online services so you don't have to be dependent from a single provider for your cloud computing needs. Obviously, you're not limited to the e-account. You can add any type of account you'd like right when you're logged in, just like you would on Android. So that e-account is a nice touch. For a beginner user, having an account that you can create that gives you access to basic services and that automatically syncs with all the apps available on your phone is a great first step, and it kind of replaces what you could do with a Google account when you buy an Android smartphone. Now, what about the EOS experience? The EOS is very inspired by iOS in terms of look and feel out of the box. You get a default grid of icons, some widgets when you swipe left, and no standard Android app drawer, as well as a global search if you swipe from the top. The icons and the launcher really remind me of previous versions of iOS, and I think that's intentional, to make sure that users coming from any smartphone can get used to the system quickly. The EOS ships with default apps for everything you might need out of the box, and all of these apps are open source, just like the EOS itself. Most of these are forks of other open source applications. For example, the web browser is a de-Google fork of Chromium, the mail client is a fork of K9, and the camera is a fork of Open Camera. Some apps are the default Android applications, like the contacts, clock, calculator, keyboard, or gallery, and some are just pre-installed apps available anywhere else, like Magic Earth for maps, PDFViewerPlus for PDFs, or OpenTasks for the to-do list. The launcher itself is very pleasing to use, but the applications do lack the coherence and similar look and feel you'd expect from a unified mobile system. They don't really behave like the others, and don't offer settings in the same place or a coherent user experience. Again, this is to be expected, as they are a collection of applications that have been put together by forking or tweaking existing open source apps. Redeveloping a whole suite of apps would have been way too time-consuming for the team, and wouldn't have added much in terms of value. I still wish the apps were rejigged a bit just to make the various interfaces coherent. Now, using these applications, you also won't help but notice the Android roots behind them. Older tab bars, three-dot menus, and pop-ups abound, and look like the stuff you'd have been using on an Android KitKat smartphone. This doesn't mean they're bad, but it does look a bit dated compared to the smooth interfaces of today. Some might prefer this older style, but I know I don't. Still, the OS has all the bells and whistles you might expect from Android. It's based on it after all. You have your notification shade, plenty of settings, strong default applications, widgets, and it's easy to connect the phone to your computer to transfer files. Now, to sum it up, the eOperatingSystem is a very pleasant system to use, and it's usable just like any Android smartphone you've ever used, or any iOS device that you've used before. It might just look like an older, scruffier version of Android than what you might have been used to, but it also doesn't phone home to Google every 10 seconds, which is, in my opinion, a really acceptable trade-off. I did find a few issues here and there, like for example the widget implementation, which has some issues with widgets that you add, third-party widgets mainly. For example, the Spotify widget just didn't occupy the right size, and as such you couldn't see the media controls. There was also a bug when I tried to delete some applications. After a while, the application grid just stayed wobbly and didn't allow me to quit the wobbly mode. I had to restart, but that only happened once, and never after that. Now, what you might think is that the eProject is just another Android fork, or another Android custom distribution, so why would you just not install any other distribution? Well, the first thing that Gary Duval said to me is that this Android distro, like the eProject, is the only one that is so de-Googled that there's basically no more Google in it. Everything that you might use otherwise still has the NTP datetime servers, or other stuff that still phone homes to Google from time to time. The EOS is completely de-Googled. There's also the fact that the EOS allows you to have an eUser account by default, which is not something that other distributions provide. The last point is that the E team is not trying to make a system for super tech-savvy or very experimented users. They are trying to make a system that even beginners can use, which is probably why it looks like iOS and not like the base default of Android. But now, here's the tricky question. If you have de-Googled the phone and you don't have access to the Play Store, what about the applications? Now, this is the most problematic point for any smartphone OS or new mobile OS. Windows Phone can attest to that. If you don't have the applications, you don't have the users. If you don't have the users, you don't have the applications. It's a vicious circle that has no end. But the eProject doesn't reinvent the wheel here. They are providing their own App Store, sure, but it's just providing a mirror of the all the APKs that you could download from the Google Play Store. And honestly, there's not much I couldn't find in there. From all the applications I use on my current smartphone, which is a Samsung Galaxy S10e, I just missed one of the applications that I currently use, which is Shazam. Everything else I could find, download, and use immediately on the E operating system through their own App Store. I could find Freeletics, Twitter, Spotify, my banking app, Mastodon, the Tusky application. I could find YouTube Studio, the YouTube app, YouCat to scan the food and see if there's anything disgusting in it. Basically, anything that I wanted to use and that I use regularly or daily on my smartphone, I could install right there on this little eSmartphone as well. Sure, the App Store experience itself might lack a little bit of polish compared to what you're used to on Android or Apple. There are no beautiful featured carousels of super promotional banners, and they are not just spamming you with new applications that you want to download, but that's a plus in my book. You just use the search, look for the app you want to install, click install, it's installed, and you can use it. And you also get some nice touches that you don't find in competing stores, like for example the privacy score. Every application, when it's downloaded by the eProject on their mirror, is scanned for access to permissions and trackers, and is given a privacy score based on that. This score is often pretty low, I was amazed. All of the apps I use are bordering on the 0 out of 10 score, and that's probably because they use a lot of permissions. Some of these are understandable, like for example a messaging app that has access to the camera. Logical. Some of them are not, and I was truly horrified by the number of permissions that these applications want to access. And I think that's the goal of the E-team here, to let users install whatever they want to use, but just inform them that what they thought was private and didn't really infringe on their privacy, might just not be as safe as they thought it was. Now all the APKs have been mirrored directly from the Play Store, which means that you can rest assured that they have been scanned, they haven't been tampered with, and no one has really tricked the application store into believing this was the official app, when it's definitely not. So there are still some issues, mainly with the Google services. The E-operating system implements Micro-G, which is an open-source re-implementation of the Google services. And this works 99% of the time, but it still will fail with some applications. The YouTube Studio app, for example, right after install didn't work. I had to go into the settings, I had to enter a Google account into the Micro-G settings, and then it just worked fantastically, just like it would on Android. Some other applications though didn't even start, like Gmail. Obviously using the E-operating system with some Google applications kind of defeats the purpose of not being tracked by Google. But if you really need them, it's nice to know that some of them will work. I still think the default experience could have been tailored a little bit more towards users, just to let them know that when they try to use a Google services requiring app, they need to enter the settings in the Micro-G tab and enter a Google account. It could be handled a little bit better. Okay, so can you replace your Android device with a smartphone running the E-operating system? Well, I'd say yes, as long as you don't depend on all the Google applications and services, which is kind of the goal of this operating system anyways. The other roadblock might be if you want to change phones every year. The E-operating system doesn't really support the latest smartphones, they need time to support the drivers and implement the operating system on top of them, so if you want to have always the latest bleeding edge hardware, that's not the system for you. Now, if neither the bleeding edge hardware or the Google applications are a problem for you, then there's nothing stopping you really from moving to E. This is a fantastic operating system. I was going in expecting something half-baked and not really working that well, and no applications, and all my stuff didn't work, and that's absolutely not the experience that I got. Now, I for one could reliably switch to E. All my applications are available there, I could find anything I wanted, and this phone is just screaming fast. The only thing that I really miss is the camera quality, like my S10e has a better camera than the S9+, but not by far, and that's a trade-off I'm kind of willing to make. Honestly, I haven't been sponsored by E to make this video. They just sent this phone for free, I have to send it back, but I'm really pondering just buying it off of them instead of sending it back. That's as good as I think E is. So a fully Linux phone like the PinePhone might be more appealing in some ways, like you want to use a full Linux distro, all the programs that you used to use and that have now been made responsive. That's the dream, that's the end dream, not using something based on Android. The problem is, if you need applications right now, and if you need a stable operating system that won't crash on you, on a phone that is reliably powerful and working right, there's nothing really out there that can beat the E operating system in my mind. So yeah, probably gonna switch to that now. Okay, so that's it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, don't hesitate to like, subscribe and turn on notifications. You can also support the channel if you really liked the video. You can become a YouTube member or a patron. Patrons and members get access to a monthly Patreon cast and the right to vote on which video topics I'll work on and ask me any questions that I can answer on the Patreon cast or directly on the community pages. So take a look at the links in the description below to check these out. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!