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The Galaxy S9 Plus with / and / OS.
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The app store / e / OS, with privacy ratings for each app.
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The / e / account system.
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The Maps application.
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/ e / OS, the “open source, pro-privacy and fully degoogled” fork of Android, is arriving in Canada and the US. Of course, you have always been able to download the software in any region, but now (as first noticed by It’s Foss News) the Foundation will start selling pre-loaded phones in North America. Previously, / e / only did business in Europe.
As usual, e Foundation’s smartphone strategy is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with / and / preloaded. In the US, there are only two phones at the moment: the Galaxy S9 for $ 379.99 or a Galaxy S9 + for $ 429.99. Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can get / e / preloaded on a Fairphone, which is also exclusive to Europe.
These Samsung phones are used devices, but the website says the devices have been “checked and refurbished to function fully at our partners’ facilities”. The phones have a one-year warranty and are described as “New” and “no surprises”. An / e / device means that you will receive a fork of Android 10 and, for ongoing support, the e Foundation says: “Our goal is to provide support with at least 3 years of software updates and security patches.”
/ e / OS was founded by Gaël Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux, and the project describes itself as a “public interest non-profit project”. / e / is built as a Linux distribution, in the sense that it takes a cured collection of other open source projects, merges them into a single product and does its best to fill in the remaining gaps. In this case, / e / is based on LineageOS, the open source, device-ready version of the Android community from Google’s Android source code. The main contribution of / e / is to fill all the gaps left by the lack of Google apps, so there is an / e / app store, a / e / storage system and cloud account and several replacement Google apps, like a Chromium – browser based, an email fork called K-9 Mail, contacts, search, photos, etc. The company is even trying to build a replacement for Google Assistant.
In fact, getting normal Android apps to run on a forked version of Android is a challenge. Google Play Services is built into many applications for things like push notifications, and there is a good chance that the functionality will not work on / and / OS. These applications will at least run on / e / OS instead of leaving immediately, thanks to the inclusion of MicroG, an open source project that hijacks Google API calls.
/ And / communication problems
This is a short digression, but I can’t find a primary source for this news, which is just another example of how incredibly frustrating it can be to try to follow or cover / e / OS. The name “/ e / OS” doesn’t really work on search engines – slashes are generally not a valid character for a search and you are looking for a single-letter operating system that works very poorly. You can hit the official e Foundation homepage, but search engines quickly move on to other things that contain the letter “e”, so it’s more difficult than necessary to bring news or other ancillary information about the operating system.
The e Foundation page does not display news or blog (there is a dead news section here), and the official / e / Twitter never announced sales in the USA. The footer “Follow us” on the e Foundation page lists a Medium blog, but the icon goes to the wrong link: this empty blog instead of this active blog, but the / e / active blog does not mention this news either.
Clearly, part of what the Foundation wants to accomplish is to build a broader movement of respect for privacy and against data collection companies, but the first step in a movement like this needs to be communication, and / and / it looks very bad in Communication. How can anyone find out about these things?
There is a chance that you don’t really need to buy a phone to run / e / OS. As with Lineage, you can install the OS at home, free of charge, if you have a compatible device. There are 138 devices officially supported by / and / OS (strangely, no Pixel smartphone, which is probably the most popular unlocked device), although only about 60 are in the latest version. There is even an “Easy Installer” for some Samsung Exynos devices.
List image by e Foundation