An Android phone without Google. There are no Google apps, Google Play services, or Animated Google Assistant. There is no Google monitoring or data scrutiny, no relentless ad segmentation, no sense of privacy being a useless exercise. Some companies, such as Huawei, have been forced to figure out how to build this type of device. Others have tried to maintain your privacy and as a way to fight the tyranny of Big Tech. None of this has ever really worked.
Murena’s team has been working on disabling Google on Android phones for the past few years, starting in 2017 when Gael Duval created an operating system that he originally named Eelo. “Like millions of others, I HAVE BECOME A GOOGLE PRODUCT,” Duval wrote in 2017. He said he wanted to create something as good as other Android software, minus all surveillance. “I need something I could even recommend to my parents or my kids,” she wrote. “Something attractive, with guarantees for more privacy. Something we could build in a reasonable amount of time, something that will improve and improve over time. ”
The operating system, now called / e / OS, has long been available on some devices, but now the product is supposedly ready for prime time: Murena is releasing what it calls “/ e / OS V1”. along with the company’s first smartphone, the $ 369 Murena One.
As a first hardware effort, it’s reasonably impressive: a smooth glass slab with a 6.5-inch screen, an eight-core MediaTek processor, a fingerprint reader on the side, and three cameras in a small hump on the side rear. The photo specs are also impressive, including a 48-megapixel main sensor on the back and a 25-megapixel pinhole camera on the front for selfies. The camera was the only place Murena seems to have escaped here, which says director of operations Alexis Noetinger was out of necessity. “People are prepared to make a lot of compensation when they move to a more privacy-oriented environment,” he said, “but we’ve seen that the camera is more likely to be very demanding of people.”
We’ll have to test them both more before we can issue a full verdict, but in my limited evidence, both seem like decent cameras, but far from what you’d expect from a recent Google, Apple or Samsung. phone.
The Murena One is a fairly simple Android phone, at least in terms of hardware. Image: Murena
In order to get rid of all possible remnants of Google, Murena had to create an incredible amount of stuff. / E / OS software includes: a custom messaging application, so you don’t need Google Messages; a browser to replace Chrome; a mapping application that uses OpenStreetMap data instead of Google data; an email client, a calendar, a file storage system, a contacts application, and just about anything you get in the Google Workspace suite. applications for notes and tasks and music and even voice recordings. Murena is even planning her own virtual assistant, named Elivia, so don’t miss out on Google Assistant.
In order to get rid of all the possible remnants of Google, Murena had to build an incredible amount of things.
Murena also created cloud back-ends for many of these services, so you can check your email in the / e / OS email application, but also use your / e / email address. instead of one ending in gmail.com. All of your online services live in Murena Cloud instead of Google or Microsoft. To some extent, all you’re doing here is switching from one centralized provider to another, but Murena says all of her products are designed with the same privacy principles as their smartphones.
It’s an admirable endeavor, but even Murena can only go so far as to abandon Google. All the companies that have ever tried it, from Huawei’s Harmony operating system to unfortunate projects like Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS, finally discovered the same thing: without the Android app ecosystem, your phone is dead in to arrive. So Murena tried to eat it too: the company changed the Google Play Store to “App Lounge”, which allows you to install all major Android apps, including, yes, by Google, but has no sign of the Google brand. .
To use the App Lounge, however, you must agree to its Terms of Service, which says at the top that you have two options: sign in with your Google Account or browse the room anonymously, but with any way, your application -The download relationship is mostly with Google. You are only downloading Play apps in a store that looks different. The Lounge gets its information directly from the Play Store (without telling Google who you are, says Murena) and uses Google for all forms of payment.
The App Lounge is not the Play Store, but … it’s basically the Play Store
The App Lounge includes some non-Play Store apps, and you can research the settings and choose to see only open source apps and progressive web apps, but this severely limits the number of apps available to you.
Connecting to Google pretty much directly confronts Murena’s promises and has angered many of Murena’s early testers, but I don’t think Murena had any choice but to handle it that way. “A smartphone without Google surveillance” is a compelling idea for many users, but “a smartphone without any of the apps you want” is a solution for almost everyone. Noetinger says that of course Murena could have built a Linux phone that would fulfill everyone’s privacy dreams, but he would not have run any application. And no one would have wanted that. “We need people to find apps,” he says, “otherwise we’ll connect with a small number of people, who will find the project fantastic, but it will end here.” Murena is trying to walk a thin line here, but the truth is, that line just doesn’t exist. You just can’t have the full Android experience without inviting Google into the equation.
Instead, when you sign in to Google or use its services, Murena tries to mitigate any data that Google may collect. It is supported by a project called MicroG, which is essentially a more private clone of some of the libraries that Google requires to run its applications, so you can use applications that require Google Play services without using Google Play services. It works mostly, although I needed to do a lot of research on Settings to sign in to my Google account on Murena One. I can’t imagine a lot of people buying / e / OS devices and rushing to install Google Maps and Chrome, but it’s still a frustrating mistake.
Murena replaced most of Google’s services, including maps, with his own. Image: Murena
Murena’s overall approach to privacy seems to focus less on stopping data collection altogether and more on security in the dark. If you enable advanced privacy in / e / OS, use a VPN to mask your location, either by choosing a “random plausible location” somewhere in the world or by letting you choose where you want to be, and even hide your IP address of the sites you visit. It also tries to block followers in every app you download, and it seems to do so quite successfully.
However, advanced privacy includes its own compensation. On the one hand, it’s hard to use weather or map apps when your phone thinks you’re in Singapore, just like mine did when I booted it from my home in Virginia. Many apps are also geo-searched in one way or another, so I had to turn off all protection for apps like Netflix and YouTube TV. (Oh yeah, and I’ve downloaded YouTube and YouTube TV because Murena can’t replace them, so Google took me there anyway.) Murena is working hard to create privacy software to set it up and forget it, but ended up requiring more touch than I wanted.
Everything / e / OS is still based on Android, of course. The device I’m using is running a forked version of Android 10 based on Lineage OS, an Android spin-off based on the old CyanogenMod project. (It’s a fork! And LineageOS is up to Android 12, but it’s a shame to see that / e / OS lags behind.) And for all of Murena’s work, it still looks like … Android. The organization has said it plans to rethink how notifications work, for example, and make other changes to the way Android works, but right now, it’s just a simple iPhone-style launcher on top of a familiar version. Android.
The Murena One is an ambitious device and / and / OS is an even more ambitious operating system. But so far, I’ve been shown how rooted Google is in our digital lives and how much more control the company has taken over its supposedly open source operating system. It seems like the only way to release Android from Google is to make it all the worse about Android. And the only way to make it better is to rebuild it from scratch. This will be difficult for anyone to achieve, no matter how much they believe in the mission.