It has been two years since I gave up on “normal” phones and changed my daily driver to a Fairphone 4 running /e/OS. It has been a bit of an experience, and something worth sharing with those out there thinking about de-Googling their lives.
It all started with an academic study detailing what data different Android phones and roms were sharing with Google, the carrier and phone producer [tcd.ie]. It was… not great. Surveilance capitalism is a horrifying monster that will have long lasting effects on the lives of generations to come. One option stood out however (emphasis mine).
Prof. Doug Leith at Trinity College Dublin along with Dr Paul Patras and Haoyu Liu at the University of Edinburgh examined the data sent by six variants of the Android OS developed by Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Realme, LineageOS and /e/OS.
Even when minimally configured and the handset is idle, with the notable exception of e/OS, these vendor-customised Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and to third parties such as Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook that have pre-installed system apps. There is no opt-out from this data collection.
Purchase and initial experience
Being a right-to-repair proponent I opted for the Fairhpone 4. The battery is removable, the phone itself is modular and repairable with a screwdriver, and spare parts are easily purchased from a major national electronics chain. It is definitely on the thicker side, which tok a bit of getting used to.
Unlocking the phone’s boot mode and flashing /e/OS on it was not too difficult – though I have an unfair advantage being a huge nerd. The instructions were not too clearly written, but reading through them a few times first made it clearer. Since I flashed the phone there has been updates both to the documentation and install methos. There is now an easy installer (currently in beta) that looks to be simple enough that even regular non-nerd people can use it. Note that you can also buy pre-flashed phones from Murena.
There was an initial push to get me to create a Murena account (cloud synch and other services), but it is not the agressive up-sale we are all used to from phone manefacturers and carriers. After an initial “no thank you” it has not bothered me again.
The phone home screen has sliders for disabling trackers in apps as well as hiding your location and IP address. Some of these may result in odd behaviours or broken apps, but it is nice to be given the option. This philosophy carries on into the phone App Store with options to only display open source apps from F-Droid, to anonymized access to the Google Play store (a must as some banking apps are not available in F-Droid oddly enough). Each app also comes with a tracker and privacy score that lists out permissions and trackers.
The phone itself is suprisingly locked-down. Something which can create a bit of an issue at first. Apps have to be given explicit access rights to data, and some do not automatically switch over if wifi is turned on (disabling, then re-enabling data fixes this and is a minor annoynace at best).
It has not all been smooth sailing however. I’ve experienced two major issues over the last two years.
Banking issue
Norway is forever pushing towards a physical-cash-less society. Which means everything from school bakesales to online shopping requires Vipps – a payment app. Getting this to work with /e/OS was a pain. I will save you the story of tedious hours spent debugging, reading and researching. In short; in order to get the app to verify you have to:
- Install the Aurora app store.
- Install chrome through Aurora.
- Set chrome as your default browser.
- Go through the Vipps app validation steps.
- Re-set your browser to which ever default you had before.
Granted, this is an issue with Vipps not /e/OS itself. The devs never thought that anyone would be using any other browser than Chrome on Android and as such has coded the verification process in a way unique to Chrome. After this however the app worked like a charm.
Broken update issue
Another issue came after a year. While installing an update there was some form of error resulting in a crash. After rebooting the phone it was impossible to update the OS or apps. Thasnkfully it was fairly straight forward doing a backup of all data and doing a factory reset. The only bump in the road was exporting contact. Hint: the export option is not available via the phone app, you know, the app you use to make phonecalls. You have to open the actual Contacts app in order to export the contacts.
The factory reset is also straight forward and simple to go through. The time spent downloading and applying the update patches however is another matter. That was a days worth.
Summary
Using /e/OS for the past two years has largely been a positive experience. There are some rough edges and pitfalls which is what you can expect when using smaller alternatives to the huge corporate behemoth. The only thing I found a little dissapointing is the inability to uninstall ALL pre-installed apps. There is still a browser, email client and few other bits and bobs bundled with the OS that have been delegated to a “bloat” folder hidden in the furthers corner of the home screen. Still, none of the pre-installed apps are agressive about not being the default app anymore.
The Fairphone4 is ok, it is very clearly a mid-range phone with a mid-range camera (/e/OS still has some issues with auto-focus and slowness when taking photos). Fairphone5 seems to have addressed some of the issues, and even with these small issues there is a calm feeling knowing that I can fix my phone at home should anything happen to it.
Though perhaps not quite ready of mass-adoption, /e/OS continues to develop and become a more solid alternative to the privacy-destroying Android platforms. I think I will stick with it. See you again in two years with another update on how that is going.