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E Foundation – deGoogled unGoogled smartphone OS and online services

e.foundation

131–137 of 137 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://calyxos.org/ is another promising Android fork similar in ideals to https://grapheneos.org/

Thanks for posting this. I spent some time looking at how "de-Googled" GrapheneOS is. If you define "de-Googled" as meaning the phone makes no connections to Google servers that you do not explicitly acknowledge/permit, then GrapheneOS is still far from "de-Googled". Just to give one example, SUPL. There are also plenty of unGoogled-Chromium patches GrapheneOS doesn't apply. I'm not saying GrapheneOS isn't way better…

You cannot have strong privacy confidence without strong security confidence.

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

#132
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…

https://doc.e.foundation/what-s-e I think the effort is very good. The result is excellent and it's really addressing a much bigger audience that PureOS.

Except the fact that the result is VERY bad, you are right :)

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

#133
post #102

Doesn't /e/ just take Lineage OS, install microg on top of it add their crappy launcher, and then take $$$ as donations. If anyone deserves donations its Lineage or MicroG. Donate upstream instead of this.

They do fund the MicroG developer: https://web.archive.org/web/20200817144004/https://e.foundat... See also https://community.e.foundation/t/microg-what-you-need-to-kno... I think part of their approach is also to sell refurbished phones (or, in partnership with Fairphone, new ones) with /e/ preinstalled, lowering the barrier to entry. There might be more, but I'm not too familiar with them.

marketing BS, they don't

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

#134
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do fund the MicroG developer: https://web.archive.org/web/20200817144004/https://e.foundat... See also https://community.e.foundation/t/microg-what-you-need-to-kno... I think part of their approach is also to sell refurbished phones (or, in partnership with Fairphone, new ones) with /e/ preinstalled, lowering the barrier to entry. There might be more, but I'm not too familiar with them.

marketing BS, they don't

What reason do you have for thinking they don't?

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

#135
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Andro…

> All I can think of is CopperheadOS which died because it was company-backed CopperheadOS did not die. https://copperhead.co/android /e/ mostly uses LineageOS code without providing attribution. They have a fair fight ahead of them and the Android FLOSS community benefits from this internal competition.

Copperhead looks interesting, thanks for that link.

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

#137
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about LineageOS + MicroG? It seems sustainable to me

LineageOS does not support MicroG officially, you will not receive support from them so I don't know what your benchmark for sustainability is. The officially stated reason (I'm paraphrasing) was because it allows for fudging the signatures of apps and services on the OS, and this breaks the security model.

But I think that in case something isn't working you would get support from MicroG, or not?
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