Android phone without Google. No Google apps, no Google Play services, no hilarious Google Assistant. Without Google monitoring and eavesdropping, without constantly targeting ads, without a sense of privacy is a pointless exercise. Some companies, such as Huawei, have been forced to figure out how to build this type of device. Several others have tried in the name of maintaining your privacy and as a way to fight the tyranny of Big Tech. None of this has ever really worked.
The Murena team has been working on degugling Android phones for the past few years, starting in 2017, when Gael Duvall created an operating system he originally called Eelo. “Like millions of others, I BECAME A GOOGLE PRODUCT,” Duvall wrote in 2017. He said he wanted to build something as good as other Android software without all the supervision. “I need something I can even recommend to my parents or children,” he wrote. “Something attractive, with guarantees of more privacy. Something we could build in a reasonable amount of time, something that will get better and better over time. ”
The operating system, now called / e / OS, has been available on several devices for some time, but now the product is ready for the first time: Murena launches what it calls “/ e / OS V1” along with the first smartphone of the company, Murena One for $ 369.
As a first hardware experience, it is relatively impressive: a smooth glass panel with a 6.5-inch display, an octa-core MediaTek processor, a fingerprint reader on the side and three cameras in a small hump on the back. The features of the photo are also impressive, including a 48-megapixel main sensor at the back and a 25-megapixel camera with holes at the front for selfies. The camera was the only place where the Moray seemed to have emptied here, which, according to Chief Operating Officer Alexis Nottinger, was necessary. “People are willing to make a lot of compromises when they move to a more privacy-oriented environment,” he said, “but we’ve seen that the camera is the most likely thing people can be very picky about.”
We’ll have to test both more before we can give a full verdict, but in my limited testing both look 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 hardware terms. Image: Moray eel
To free his device from every possible remnant of Google, Murena had to build an incredible amount of things. The / e / OS software comes with: a custom messaging app, so you don’t need Google Messages; a browser to replace Chrome a map application that uses OpenStreetMap data instead of Google data; email client, calendar, file storage system, contact application and practically everything else you would get in the Google Workspace package; applications for notes and tasks and music and even voice recordings. Murena is even planning his own virtual assistant named Elivia, so you won’t miss Google Assistant.
To free his device from every possible remnant of Google, Murena had to build an incredible amount of things
Murena has built cloud back endpoints for many of these services as well, so you can check your email in the / e / OS email application, but also use your / e / email address instead of one that ends in gmail.com . All your online services live in Murena Cloud instead of Google or Microsoft. To some extent, all you’re really doing here is replacing one centralized provider with another, but Murena says all of its products are designed with the same privacy principles against surveillance as his smartphones.
It’s a delightful effort, but even Murena can only go so far in abandoning Google. Every company that has ever tried this, from Huawei’s Harmony OS to ill-fated projects like Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS, has finally found the same thing: without the Android app ecosystem, your phone is dead on arrival. So Murena tried to take the cake and eat it: the company replaced the Google Play Store with the “App Lounge”, which allows you to install all major Android apps – including, yes, those made by Google – but there are no signs of Google brand.
However, to use the App Lounge, you must accept its Terms and Conditions, which state at the top that you have two options – sign in with your Google Account or view the Lounge anonymously – but anyway, your app – the download relationship are mostly with Google. Just download Play apps to a different looking store. Lounge retrieves 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 a Play Store, but … it’s actually a Play Store
The App Lounge includes some apps that aren’t in the Play Store, and you can dig into 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.
The connection to Google goes quite directly in the face of Murena’s promises and angered many of Murena’s early testers, but I don’t think Murena had any choice but to do so. “Unattended smartphone by Google” is a fascinating idea for many users, but “smartphone without any of the applications you want” is an obstacle for almost everyone. Nottinger says Murena could certainly have built a Linux phone to fulfill everyone’s dreams of privacy, but he would not run any applications. And no one would want that. “We need people to find applications,” he says. but the truth is that this limit simply does not 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 the data that Google may collect. It is based on 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 actually using Google Play services. It mostly works, although it took a lot of digging into the settings to log in to my Google Account on Murena One. I can’t imagine many people buying / e / OS devices and then rushing to install Google Maps and Chrome, but this is still a frustrating bug.
Murena replaced most of Google’s services, including maps, with its own. Image: Moray eel
Murena’s overall approach to privacy seems to focus less on stopping data collection altogether and more on security through the unknown. If you turn on Advanced Privacy in / e / OS, it uses a VPN to mask your location – either by choosing a “randomly plausible location” somewhere in the world, or allowing you to choose where you want to be – and even hiding your IP address from sites that you visit. It also tries to block trackers in every application you download, and it seems to be doing quite well.
Extended privacy, however, comes with its own trade-offs. On the one hand, it’s hard to use weather apps or maps when your phone thinks you’re in Singapore, as mine did when I first charged it from my house in Virginia. Many apps are also geo-restricted in one way or another, so I had to turn off all security for apps like Netflix and YouTube TV. (Oh, yes, and I downloaded YouTube and YouTube TV because Murena can’t replace them, so Google directed me there anyway.) Murena is trying hard to create privacy and setup software, but in the end it requires more fun than I wanted.
The whole / e / OS is still based on Android, of course. The device I use runs on a branched version of Android 10, based on Lineage OS, a spinoff for Android based on the old CyanogenMod project. (It’s a fork! And LineageOS is all the way up to Android 12, so it’s annoying to see that / e / OS is lagging behind.) And for all of Murena’s work, it still looks like … Android. The organization said it plans to rethink the way notifications work, for example, and make other changes to the way Android works, but for now it’s just an iPhone-style launcher on top of an otherwise familiar version of Android.
Murena One is an ambitious device, and / e / OS is an even more ambitious operating system. But so far, they’ve mostly shown me how ingrained Google is in our digital lives and how much more control the company has taken over its supposedly open source operating system. The only way to get rid of Android from Google seems to be to make things a little worse for Android. And the only way to possibly improve it is to restore it from scratch. This will be difficult for everyone, no matter how fervently they believe in the mission.
Add Comment