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The Galaxy S9 Plus with / e / OS.
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The / e / OS app store, with privacy ratings for each app.
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The / e / account system.
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The Maps app.
e Foundation
/ e / OS, the “open source, pro-privacy, and fully degoogled” fork of Android, is coming to Canada and the US. Of course, you could always download the software in any region, but now (as first spotted by It’s Foss News), the e Foundation will start selling pre-charged phones in North America. Previously, / e / did business only in Europe.
As usual, the strategy of the e Foundation’s smartphone is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with / e / preloaded. In the US, there are currently only two phones: the Galaxy S9 for $ 379.99 or a Galaxy S9 + for $ 429.99. North Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can / e / charge on a Fairphone, which is also Europe-exclusive.
These Samsung phones are used devices, but according to the website, the devices have been “checked and refurbished to fully work at our partner’s facilities.” The phones have a one-year warranty and are described as ‘Good-as-new’ with ‘no surprises’. A / e / device means you will get Android 10, and for ongoing support, the e Foundation says, “We strive to support with at least three years of software updates and security solutions.”
/ e / OS was founded by Gaël Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux, and the project describes itself as a ‘non-profit project in the public interest’. / e / is built much like a Linux distribution, requiring a collection of other open source projects, merging it into a single product and doing its best to fill in the remaining gaps. In this case, / e / is based on LineageOS, the Android community’s open source, device-ready version of Google’s Android source code. The primary contribution of / e / is to fill in all the gaps in the lack of Google applications, so there is an / e / app store, a / e / cloud storage and account system and various Google replacement programs such as a Chromium-based browser, an email fork called K-9 Mail, contacts, search, photos, etc. The company is even trying to build a Google Assistant replacement.
It’s a challenge to run regular Android apps on a version of Android. Google Play Services is built into many apps for things like push notifications, and chances are that functionality will not work on / e / OS. These programs will at least run to / e / OS instead of leaving straight, thanks to the inclusion of MicroG, an open source project that hijacks Google API calls.
/ e /’s communication problems
It’s a slight deviation, but I can not find a first party source for this news, which is just another example of how incredibly frustrating it can be to try to track or cover the e / OS. The name “/ e / OS” does not really work on search engines – slashes are usually not a valid character for a search, and you are going to search for a single letter system, which works very poorly. You can nail the official homepage of the e Foundation, but search engines quickly switch to other things that contain the letter “e”. It is therefore more difficult to present news or other supplementary information about the operating system.
The e Foundation’s website contains no news or has a blog (here is a section for dead news) and the official / e / Twitter never announced U.S. sales. The “Follow us” pedestal on the e Foundation page contains a medium blog, but the icon goes to the wrong link: this empty blog instead of this active blog, but the active / e / blog does not mention this news either.
It is clear that part of what the Foundation wants to achieve is to build a wider movement with respect for privacy and repression of data collection companies, but step one of a movement like this should be communication, and / e / looks very bad in communication. How is anyone supposed to figure this out?
Chances are you don’t actually have to buy a phone to run it. Just like with Lineage, you can install the operating system for free at home if you have a compatible device. There are 138 devices officially supported by / e / OS (oddly enough no Pixel phones, which are probably the most popular unlocked devices), although only about 60 appear on the latest version. There is even an “Easy Installer” for some Samsung Exynos devices.
List by the Foundation