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E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

e.foundation

21–30 of 137 posts

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people wouldn't think a smartphone OS was complete without an online component. If you truly don't want that postmarketOS and a number of Linux distros work on some older phones and the pinephone now.

Reality: "Most people" can not even parse your assertion, much less take a position on it.

You can dump a device running GNU/Linux in front of them and when push notifications don't work the way they expect they'll tell you "it's broken."

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#22
post #18
post #13

One of the things that feels a bit problematic here - the webpage is avoiding mention of the fact that this is still Android. In essence, this is still Google's OS and the team has decided to start a fight against Google by taking their opensource and perpetually fight against the main developer by removing their proprietary component. I don't think this is a fight that's sustainable - a giant graveyard of Android pr…

This was the conclusion I came to after using android 4-5 for a while. Android is not designed for the community to be hacking on it. While these projects occasionally appear they don't last because of the incredible amount of work required to maintain them. You're much better off finding a normal Linux distro/phone pair that can make phone calls etc.

Just bought a KaiOS phone, waiting for it to arrive, I will see how it will behave.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#23
I looked at /e/ extensively before buying a new phone and ultimately settled on GrapheneOS. I'd much prefer the de-Googling to be combined with a focus on security, where Google has admittedly done some important work for Android. I'm sure it's not quite as functional as /e/ given the lack of integrated Google services and other bits and pieces, but a surprising number of apps work perfectly without these things and I rarely miss them.

I would also recommend Shelter for a work profile for non-open source apps, which one can install on one of the Play Store clones such as Aurora.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#24

Why do we have to give access to our entire hard-drive to share one file once? How is it legal for someone else to give away your phone number, your addresses for the last 30 years, your email addresses, and the rest of your personal contact information, along with all the contact information of everyone else they ever met to any app they like? Why can apps run your mic and camera 24 hours a day in the background bec…

Because J Random Grandma just wants to share photos of her grandkids or whatever and doesn't understand all this "computer nonsense". I agree that security needs to be rethought, but putting more moats / popups in the way is not going to work. We already learned that from the past- it doesn't matter how many warnings you put in a web browser, those that are uneducated are still going to mash the install button to get those Comet Cursors or whatever.

I'm curious how this will change when the entire populate has more tech knowledge in general. A few decades, and everybody on the planet will have grown up with computers, and a couple more past that and everyone will have always had a smart phone.

I'm not super hopeful though. Security and Privacy are always a tradeoff with convenience. And if I've learned anything during my revolutions on this planet, it's that we humans really love convenience. I'd say this will keep getting worse until we get a massive data breach... but we've already had a few of those and aside from it being on the news and maybe a congressional hearing, nothing changes. So I think it will keep getting worse until we find out what the market will bear. And I'm morbidly curious what that will be, even as I scream into the wind attempting to prevent it.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#25
post #18
post #13

One of the things that feels a bit problematic here - the webpage is avoiding mention of the fact that this is still Android. In essence, this is still Google's OS and the team has decided to start a fight against Google by taking their opensource and perpetually fight against the main developer by removing their proprietary component. I don't think this is a fight that's sustainable - a giant graveyard of Android pr…

This was the conclusion I came to after using android 4-5 for a while. Android is not designed for the community to be hacking on it. While these projects occasionally appear they don't last because of the incredible amount of work required to maintain them. You're much better off finding a normal Linux distro/phone pair that can make phone calls etc.

Nowadays I single-handledly (well almost, I do have some contributors, thanks to them) maintain a pure unmodified Android that works on hundreds (probably thousands) of different devices.

It has become a lot easier thanks to Project Treble.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#26
post #13

One of the things that feels a bit problematic here - the webpage is avoiding mention of the fact that this is still Android. In essence, this is still Google's OS and the team has decided to start a fight against Google by taking their opensource and perpetually fight against the main developer by removing their proprietary component. I don't think this is a fight that's sustainable - a giant graveyard of Android pr…

I guess it depends where your priorities lie, but this effort seems _more_ sustainable to me because it can run most proprietary android apps, and everything on F-Droid right out of the box.

PureOS has to try and reimplement an entire mobile app ecosystem just to get to parity with existing competitors.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#27
post #22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the conclusion I came to after using android 4-5 for a while. Android is not designed for the community to be hacking on it. While these projects occasionally appear they don't last because of the incredible amount of work required to maintain them. You're much better off finding a normal Linux distro/phone pair that can make phone calls etc.

Just bought a KaiOS phone, waiting for it to arrive, I will see how it will behave.

It seems like KaiOS would actually be worse for privacy. Same apps but less ability to toggle permissions.

What makes you interested in it?

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#28
I'm using e.foundation for a while now on my Moto G3 (osprey) and it's working ok despite a few camera/gallery crashes here and there.

The only thing I'm not really fond of, is that the apps come from an opaque source (https://info.cleanapk.org/). I also found no information on how those apps are signed, and how this is checked. Upon asking them, someone pointed me to a git commit where an outdated public key of F-Droid was used.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#29

Had me until it mentioned "the cloud" Does it force you to have data on the cloud? Or can you get by without using the cloud? Simply put: I don't want anyone having my data anywhere apart from me and my device.

The cloud "just" uses davx5, which you can ignore, or use to sync to your own nextcloud server, or you can create an account on their nextcloud instance.

I obviously use my own nextcloud.

Some mircrog stuff is enabled by default, which means it does allow apps to talk to Google for eg. push messages. It's not much work to disable, though.

Re: E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

#30
post #13

One of the things that feels a bit problematic here - the webpage is avoiding mention of the fact that this is still Android. In essence, this is still Google's OS and the team has decided to start a fight against Google by taking their opensource and perpetually fight against the main developer by removing their proprietary component. I don't think this is a fight that's sustainable - a giant graveyard of Android pr…

I don't think the graveyard of Android privacy forks is that big? All I can think of is CopperheadOS which died because it was company-backed. You could argue CyanogenMod died, though really it's still well alive in LineageOS. (and CyanogenMod wasn't really privacy-focused)

I have a very high respect for all the work that's been done on the various GNU/Linux mobile distributions, but it's still so far away from Android wrt usability...

I agree there is something weird about fighting Google with Android, but still it makes perfect sense.

From a business or engineering PoV, you want best features for the fastest MVP. Android gives you just that. Actually it goes way beyond, /e/ didn't do much of engineering, they mostly re-used what's done by the Android FLOSS community. (Honestly I don't really like /e/ because they basically don't give anything back to the community but well).

If /e/ is ever successful, they can hire many engineers to actually fork Android to have their own. That's what Android did for Linux in the first place anyway! Most OEMs have a lot of changes to their Android, even though they keep using Google apps, and they are just fine. I'm pretty sure that Samsung have an order of magnitude more changes in Android than LineageOS (which /e/ is a pretty direct fork of), and they maintain it just fine.

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