A look at /e/OS on the FairPhone 3 – a FOSS OS for phones [video] (opens in new tab)

I'm a FP3 and /e/ user for about half a year now. And well, it works for me but frankly there are some issues. Nothing I'm not willing to take, but it's different to the premium android device with google services before. The Appstore provides some apps. But not all of them and some are quite outdated. They seem to get their APKs from https://info.cleanapk.org/. Some apps just don't work or stop reacting to touches. But this can be an Issue with the missing Google Services. The FP3 is a decent phone. It does its job well images are ok (old camera) focus and stabilization are not as good as flagship phones. The fingerprint reader is pretty unreliable. It usually needs some tries... However, its repairable, the price is fair for what you get, they try to be sustainable, there is /e/-os and lineage available. That's the main reason I bought it: I expect to use it as long as I want and not only as log as the manufacturer publishes the patches.

I wonder if it implements Accessibility APIs and a screen reader. It took Google years to catch up to what VoiceOver on iOS can do. I hope FOSS does not forget about this topic on phones. My phone has become the most ubiquitous assistive technology in my life. Checking public transport arrival times. reading labels on canned food. using tools like Be My Eyes to solve everything for which there is no deep learning application yet. All these things would be impossible without a good Accessibility API and screen reader. And before you ask, no, voice enabling a select few applications is not the solution. This is what Android tried in the first years. It was horrible and pretty laughable at the same time.

Off topic: how is one supposed to search for "/e/"? Is there some alternative spelling?

On topic: I like that /e/ foundation is selling new and refurbished phones with the OS installed. It (hopefully) gives them some income and it helps get this OS in hands of users who would rather not tempt the goddess of bricks.

From the page:

It consists of:

an installable mobile operating system for smartphones, which is forked from Android and strongly “ungoogled”

a set of sorted and improved default open source applications

various online services that are linked to the mobile operating system, such as: a meta search engine for the web, drive (with synchronization), mail, calendar, notes, tasks.

Anyone outside Europe can buy the Fairphone 3+ from Clove UK [1]. They have 25 yrs experience shipping phones. The official fairphone store ships only inside europe.

But first check FP3/FP3+ Network specifications below to see whether the 4G LTE bands of your carrier are supported:

In case you need it for your specific situation, the network specifications for the FP3/FP3+:

    Configuration Dual-SIM, Dual-Standby (DSDS)
    SIM Sockets 2 x Nano-SIM (4FF)
    Network Technology 2G / 3G / 4G LTE - Advanced 
    GSM/GPRS/EDGE Quad-band: 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz 
    UMTS: Band 1 (2100 MHz); Band 2 (900 MHz); Band 5 (850MHz); Band 8 (900 MHz)
    3G Max Downlink Speed - 42 Mbps
    3G Max Uplink - 11 Mbps
    4G / LTE Advanced Band 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 7 / 13 / 20 / 26
    4G Max Downlink Speed - 300 Mbps
    4G Max Uplink Speed - 75 Mbps

Source: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047326452

[1] https://www.clove.co.uk/collections/smartphones/products/fai...

The e.foundation home page caters to users without any technical knowledge, which is great but I'm not sure users of alternative mobile operating systems are quite there yet. It's not even immediately obvious this is Android-based.

It would be useful to list some more specifics. Is this built on LineageOS? Does it come with their own cloud services? Can you opt out of that? How close do you track LineageOS?

The video shows someone installing the Facebook app. That puts a limit to how de-googled this could possibly be. How are those products distributed? Can anything from the Play store be installed the same way?

Happy user of LineageOS here, but there is definitively room for a more complete system with best of breed open source apps installed for those services most people require (mail, chat, maps etc.). Alternative application stores makes me wary however, F-Droid does an admirable job but compared to something like Debian they are still tiny.

Some food for thought https://web.archive.org/web/20200731160632/https://ewwlo.xyz...

/e/ is a great idea, but it really leaves a sour taste in my mouth how the /e/ foundation hides the contributions of the free software projects they rely on.

https://microg.org/ is the core that makes it possible to create the /e/ distribution, but good luck finding that in any of /e/'s promotional material.

I love to see any project that aims to end smartphone duopoly craziness - but seriously, he's trying to end the dependency of a central google account by replacing it with an /e account as the first step? This does not make any sense and is so contradictory to the idea that I did not look any further into the project (some while ago).

Thinking of buying a fairphone and using e on it, but I have a question about apps, and thought hackernews might know:

I don't need that many apps, but the few I do need are very specific, such as the local public transportation app, and bankID from my bank.

Can I just download those from the normal google app store?

Recent discussion about Fairphone 3+ , for those interested:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553617