The Murena One shows exactly how hard it is to de-Google your smartphone

There is a phone with an operating system other than the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with the one with No peppy Google Assistant, no apps, and no Play Services. Privacy is not a pointless exercise and no one is snooping on you. Some companies have had to figure out how to build this kind of device. Some people have tried to fight back against Big Tech by keeping their privacy. It has never really worked.

The team at Murena has been working on de-Googling Android phones for the last few years. He wrote that he wanted to build something similar to other software. Something that 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 a few devices for a while, but now the product is supposedly ready for prime time.

As a first hardware effort, it's reasonably impressive: a slick slab of glass with a 6.5-inch display, an eight-core MediaTek processor, a fingerprint reader on the side, and three cameras in a small hump on the back. The photography specifications include a main sensor on the back and a 25-megapixel camera on the front for selfies. The camera was the one place Murena seems to have spent a lot of money on.

We'll have to test them both more before we can give a full verdict, but in my limited testing they both seem to be decent cameras, but a far cry from what you'd expect from a recent Apple or Google camera.

Image: Murena

Murena had to build a lot of stuff in order to get rid of its device. You don't need a browser to use the custom-made messaging app, an email client, a calendar, or a file if you use the /e/OS software. Murena is planning a virtual assistant named Elivia, so you won't miss it.

Murena built cloud back ends for many of those services, so you can check your email in the /e/OS email app but also use your email address instead of one ending in gmail.com. Murena Cloud is where your online services live. Murena says all of its products are designed with the same anti-surveillance privacy principles as its phones.

It's an admirable effort, but even Murena can only go so far. Every company that has ever tried this has found the same thing: your phone is dead on arrival if you don't have an app. The company swapped the Play Store for the App Lounge, which allows you to install all major Android apps.

You have to accept the Terms of Service in order to use the App Lounge, but you can either log in with your Google account or browse the Lounge anonymous. You just downloaded Play apps in a different store. Murena says that The Lounge uses the Play Store to get its information and that it uses the internet to pay.

There are some non-Play Store apps that can be found in the App Lounge, but you can only see open-sourced apps and progressive web apps, and that limits the number of apps available to you.

I don't think Murena had another choice but to connect to Google, it flies in the face of his promises and has made a lot of his early testers mad. Noetinger says that Murena could have built a Linux phone that fulfilled everyone's privacy dreams, but it wouldn't have run any apps. He says that they need people to find apps, otherwise they will connect to a small amount of people who will find the project great. You can't have the full experience without inviting the company that makes it to the table.

Murena tries to mitigate the data that can be collected by the company. It mostly works, though it took a lot of work, because it leans on a project called MicroG that is a private clone of some of the libraries that are required to run its apps. I can't imagine many people are buying a device and rushing to install something, but it's still frustrating.

Image: Murena

Murena's approach to privacy seems to focus less on stopping data collection altogether and more on security by obscurity. If you turn on Advanced Privacy in OS, you can either pick a random plausible location or choose where you want to be. It tries to block trackers in every app that you download.

Advanced Privacy has its own tradeoffs. It's difficult to use weather or maps apps when your phone thinks you're in Singapore, as I did when I first installed it from my house in Virginia. I had to turn off all of the protection for apps that are alsogeofenced, because lots of them are. I downloaded both of those because Murena can replace them. Murena is trying to create a privacy software that is easy to use.

All of /e/OS is still based on Android. I use a device that is running a version of the operating system called Lineage OS, which is a spinoff of the old CyanogenMod project. It is a fork of a fork. It's a shame to see OS lag behind, as LineageOS is all the way up to the next version of the OS. For all of Murena's work, it still looks like an operating system. The organization plans to change the way notifications work and other things, but right now, it is just a simple app on top of an otherwise familiar version of Android.

The Murena One is an ambitious device and the OS is even more ambitious. They have mostly shown me how ingrained the company is in our digital lives and how much more control it has over our operating system. It seems that the only way to get rid of Google is to make things worse. The only way to make it better is to rebuild from the ground up. It's going to be difficult for anyone to pull it off, no matter how much they believe in the mission.