I recently got an e-mail from Fairphone that they will be ending support for Fairphone 3(+) in a couple of months and I’m thinking about getting a replacement with /e/OS installed on it instead of Android.

All the independent information I can find seems to be from two or three years ago, so I was wondering if anyone with recent experience or knowledge has any thoughts about it?

I’m not interested in recommendations for other operating systems as I’m only considering switching from Android because there is an option for it to come pre-installed on the latest Fairphone with the bootloader locked, which may solve a few headaches. I’d just like to know if /e/OS has any gotchas to be aware of and if Ecorp/Esolutions/Murena are considered to be reputable (i.e. they’re not going to steal my data).

  • Doorknob@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    13 hours ago

    I’ve been daily-driving it for several years. I think it’s very good, generally, and am happy to stick with it for the foreseeable future. Murena asks you to sign up for their cloud services on first boot, but if you say no, they’ll never bother you about it again. I don’t use them, so can’t comment on whether they’re any good.

    I have found their App Lounge app (Google Play Store/FDroid alternatives rolled into one) to be spotty. Sometimes I’ve found I had to reboot the phone to get it to download/update apps. They have made updates recently that improve this a lot and I haven’t seen it presenting these kinds of issues over the last couple months, but I won’t say they’ve definitively fixed the issues. You can always fall back to Aurora store for Google Store apps and FDroid for FOSS apps if the App Lounge gives you big headaches.

    I use FOSS apps where possible over Google apps. Organic Maps is excellent, often better than GMaps. Banking apps work fine for me. Haven’t tried NFC for payments, I don’t use it.

    There’s no instances of Murena and related orgs doing anything shady about data collection or anything afaik, their big conceit is privacy and they’d be sunk if there were any scandals around that. If you have a threat model that requires an extremely high amount of security however, you may prefer to steer clear as /e/ freely admit they make trade-offs in hardening for convenience and ease of use. While they incorporate the latest security patches from LineageOS, GrapheneOS continually allege that /e/'s modifications can make their OS less secure than stock Android. How true that is, I don’t know. Assume your phone can be hacked at any time if it were specifically targeted.

    If you’re in the market for a phone that’s just good for everyday use but doesn’t have all the Google tie-ins, I can recommend it.