/e/ product description - a pro-privacy Android ROM and online services
What’s in /e/?
/e/ is a complete mobile ecosystem which includes the ROM and online - services.
/e/ is
- Open source
- Pro-privacy
- Compatible with most existing Android applications
- Cares about usability
/e/ is an alternative to the Apple/Google duopoly for the android smartphone user.
/e/ consists of:
- an installable mobile operating system for smartphones, which is forked from Android and completely “ungoogled”
- a default set of open source applications that have been improved and optimized for the user
- various online services that are linked to the mobile operating system, such as: a meta search engine for the web, a cloud drive with data synchronization, mail, calendar, notes, tasks.
/e/ is also available pre-installed on a range of /e/-smartphones.
Description of the /e/ ROM
The /e/ ROM is a fork of Android and in particular the LineageOS flavor of Android.
At present we support five Android versions:
- R
- Q
- Pie
- Oreo
- Nougat
DeGoogling / UnGoogling
The goal of “unGoogling” is
- To remove or disable any feature or code that is sending data to Google servers
To offer non-Google default online services, including for search.
- Google default search engine is removed and replaced by other services (see below in default apps and services)
- Google Services are replaced by microG and alternative services (see below for more details)
- All Google apps are removed and replaced by equivalent Open Source applications. The one exception is the Maps Application
- No use of Google servers to check connectivity
- NTP servers are not Google NTP servers anymore
- DNS default servers are not Google anymore, and their settings can be enforced by the user to a specific server
- Geolocation is using Mozilla Location Services in addition to GPS
- CalDAV/CardDAV management and synchronization application (DAVDroid) is fully integrated with the user account and calendar/contact application
More details about the state of /e/ OS deGooglisation can be found in this white paper.
User interface
A new launcher “BlissLauncher” was developed to offer an attractive look and feel. Its features include
- Easy to understand UI with almost no learning curve for the new user
- Application widget support
- Uses the /e/ search engine by default
- Icons that were designed specifically for the project.
Improvements made in settings to offer a better looking interface
Services
- A specific file synchronization service has been developed for multimedia and file contents.
It can use /e/ cloud services server at https://ecloud.global or self-hosted /e/ cloud services (beta).
- The weather provider is the LOS weather provider using data fetched from Open Weather Map
- Account Manager has been modified to support /e/ user accounts, with a single identity, thus providing the /e/ users
- /e/ email
- /e/ sync
- /e/ calendar
- /e/ contacts
- /e/ note
- /e/ task
The /e/ user can decide where they want to store their data. It could be either the cloud server ecloud.global, or self-hosted by the user (ongoing development)
/e/ default applications
All pre-installed applications are open source applications except for the Maps app (read details about this in the Maps FAQ).
- Web-browser: an ungoogled fork of Chromium, built from Bromite patch-sets, with specific /e/ settings
- Mail: a fork of K9-mail for better user experience, some bugfixes and support for oauth, with OpenKeyChain for PGP encryption support
- Message: a fork of QKSMS
- Camera: a fork of OpenCamera
- Dialer: default Android dialer application
- Calendar: a fork of Etar calendar, that fixes crashes with calendar invitations
- Contact: default Android contact application
- Clock: a fork of Android deskclock application
- Gallery: default Android gallery3d application
- Filemanager: Android documentsui application
- Sound recorder: default LineageOS sound recorder
- Calculator: default Android calculator2 application
- Keyboard: default Android keyboard
- Android application installer is /e/ application installer, that supports more than 60,000 applications.
Other preinstalled applications:
- Maps: MagicEarth (read the Maps FAQ for details about its license)
- PDF reader: PdfViewer Plus
- Notes: a fork of NextCloud Notes to support /e/ online accounts
- Tasks: OpenTasks
/e/ online services at ecloud.global
/e/ “spot” at https://spot.ecloud.global search engine is a fork of SearX meta-search engine. Improvements made include
- Peformance enhancements
- User interface improvement
/e/ cloud includes
- cloud drive
- calendar
- contacts
- Notes
- Tasks
- Office
It is built upon NextCloud, Postfix, Dovecot and OnlyOffice.
It has been integrated to offer a single login identity in /e/OS as well as online. accordion
Users can retrieve their data at https://ecloud.global services, or self-hosted on their own server
/e/ Development Updates
2019
We addressed a number of issues with ungoogling.
This included among others:
- removed connectivity check against Google servers
- replaced Google NTP servers by pool.ntp.org servers
- replaced Google DNS servers by 9.9.9.9 by default and offer users to set the DNS servers of their choice
More details about the state of /e/ OS deGooglisation can be found in this white paper.
2020
We introduced the “easy installer” . It lets users install /e/ OS without using obscure tools or the command line.
Currently available in Linux and Windows. Development is now community driven.
- Working on pro-privacy features such as a “privacy dashboard”
- Added more supported smartphones (FairPhone 3 and 3+, PinePhone, GigaSet…)
- Worked on adding more features such as “my SMS to cloud” and “my geolocation to cloud” (Work in Progress)
- Added Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to the application installer V2
2021
- Add the capability to un-install some of the system applications where possible
- Offer corresponding Google-free SDKs for app publishers, because we believe that web apps is the future for most mobile applications.
- Make /e/OS available in two versions:
- standard /e/ with default applications
- /e/ with minimal number of default/pre-installed applications
This is partially implemented as some devices which have less disk space get a MINIMAL_APPS version of the /e/OS
What to expect in future releases?
Check out the eRoadmap section in our FAQ
Want to give /e/ a try?
Or
Purchase an /e/-smartphone.