E.foundation officially supports microG development

Nice! :grin: Should have more g00-- reliant apps working more smoothly now

“European Union” … nice touch :+1: .

Does a similar statement exist or is it planned concerning LineageOS?
Like … Contribution of /e/ developers to the LineageOS base of /e/? Donations? Infrastructure?

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I was thinking exactly the same thing when I read your post.
Officially supporting the two open source projects on which /e/ is based would be very neat!

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First a collaboration with Fairphone, now officially supporting microG ? /e/ is definitely moving in the best direction to offer us a GAFAM-free ecosystem ! :smiley: THANK YOU !!!

By the way, any news regarding the renaming of /e/ ? Everytime I try to explain what it is to someone new, the first thing I have to do is point out the spelling and explaining how to call it…

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The most ‘secure’ device rated by Google itself (same can be said about Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc…) has to come with stock rom and google services.
The privacy rating in this case is an absolute 0

Even though ‘security’ concerns cant be dismissed so easily, they cant overcome either privacy concerns. For me at least.

But hey, if you want the most ‘secure’ (whatever that means) device, feel free to stay with stock rom.

Because it originates in the European Union. It’s a place in this context :wink: .

Since you seem to be in the UK you might not bother in the not so far future, but the e foundation is set up under French law, so complying with EU regulations should come with that, if not for France paying fines for not adopting EU regulations within due time. Some countries take the liberty to do that here and there.

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The only contrinution toward LineageOS I’m aware of is working sources for the FP3 (device tree and kernel).

I don’t know if I should feel happy or sad about this news. The ultimate would be Microg is not needed anymore. Using Microg causes data to go through Google servers. We must not underestimate Google, they have a lot of skilled people working for them. They are capable of creating smart algorithms linking all sorts of data. Maybe the Microg developer can write a document about what data exactly is exchanged.

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Imagine a stairs to go to Privacy World. Without MicroG, you have one missing step and have to jump from something with GApps to something without GApps. The majority of people just aren’t ready to do this and will continue to use GApps because it can be very useful, especially for notifications.

Let’s people migrate to Privacy World at their rythm by filling the gap and adding the missing step to the stairs with a privacy ROM but with MicroG. This way it reduces tracking to the bare minimum for a needed usage.

And MicroG could be also useful to bypass SafetyNet (which is broken for a year). Yes apps that need SafetyNet (some banking apps, Snapchat) aren’t good apps but sometimes they are just needed and again, it will always be much better than a stock ROM and will forge a privacy mind.

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Hi @GaelDuval,

This is really great to hear! :+1:

But, is it okay to say “implementation” of another company’s work? To me that suggests copyright infringement! :astonished: MicroG isn’t actually implementing Google’s library but implementing something else which has an API compatible with Google’s library. Those are completely different things aren’t they?

I’m sure you and the MicroG team are happy with the wording, but given how trigger-happy tech companies can be with IP disputes that wording makes me nervous.

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face:

I have doubts about MicroG.
I know it is used to somehow bridge those apps that use Google’s services, but without directly use Google (though going through it servers, sure).

My doubt is more about if only apps from/built for Google Store are which use Google’s services. For example, does apps from F-Droid use Google’s services?

And for instance, where and how can those GAFAM-free apps be found?

I don’t think so.

Mainly on F-Droid.

And don’t forget that MicroG can be disabled very easily so nobody is forced to use it :slight_smile:

Oh! That’s really good news! I’ve been using F-droid apps from a year ago and now, using /e/OS, I only use preinstalled and F-Droid apps, except TWRP official app, downloaded via Aurora Store

I’m nearer from ungooglation than I thought!

Indeed if you use only /e/OS and apps from F-Droid (or from the /e/ Apps installer in “Open source only” mode) then you are more than ungoogled, you are completely free :slight_smile: (at least for your smartphone, I don’t know about your laptop).

Wow, how good! I didn’t think it would be so good :slight_smile:
(And yes, I use GNU/Linux and as free as I can apps)

Other tiny doubt I have about Maps (Magic Earth): I read ME is proprietary but free of charge… is it?

Oh yes indeed you are 99% free since Magic Earth isn’t open source but is without tracker and with a very good privacy policy. Magic Earth might become open source in the future, as far as I know discussions are in progress between the e Foundation and Magic Earth but I can’t be sure.

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GrapheneOS is based on AOSP like any other Android variant out there, and the main work on AOSP is done by Google.
Of course, GrapheneOS seems to make good additions and changes to AOSP.

But I guess people using real non-Android OSes like Ubuntu Touch, PureOS or Sailfish OS on their devices will not be happy with your definition of being “truly Google free” :wink: .

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You seem to deliberately misinterpret what I wrote, or alternatively you don’t seem to fully realise that you are running an Android variant on your phone. Which is it?

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Perhaps I’m overly pedantic on this, and perhaps this causes a misunderstanding here, but my point is (hopefully more clear this way):

GrapheneOS is Android-based.
I don’t dispute the efforts that go into additions and changes in GrapheneOS to improve it compared to the Android base. And I don’t dispute that a phone running GrapheneOS may have zero encounters and exchanges with any Google services in practice.

Still, running an Android-based OS means using something based on Google’s work and stewardship, much more than people running e.g. the mentioned non-Android OSes do.
So a claim to be “truly Google free" or “100% Google free” while running an Android-based OS in my opinion is misleading when there are OSes with clearly less Google involvement around.

(I realise this went off-topic, but perhaps the respective posts could be moved to a new topic?)

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This is an important point: obviously, even if we don’t send any piece of data to Google, having /e/OS relying on AOSP codebase is still a dependency, because we know that Google is leading the design of AOSP even though it’s 100% open source, even though they use the Linux kernel.

But that remains true for some other open source projects. Even if you take Linux, for decades its development has been sponsored by some big techs (Intel, IBM, Red Hat…), and there is little doubt that there could have been some influence on the development roadmap and features at some point. Just look at the Linux Foundation sponsors…
But that’s the beauty of Open Source software: Freedom. Freedom to fork it if you want to fork. Go big enough and fork.

Until now, our goal was to offer a credible product that is sending no or very few data to Google, because we all know the threat that 1 single company is permanently harvesting personal data of billions users worldwide. So we found a path.

Now, ideally, we would like to break free completely from the Google, with a realistically usable product, and for this we need to go step by step.

Today, I don’t think the OS itself (AOSP) is the most problematic. The biggest concern is probably more about Applications.

Android apps rely on the Android SDK, which is fully controlled by Google, and on the Google Play Services, with two sub-problems:

  • push notifications (GCM/FCM)
  • the in-app purchase feature which is mandatory for many app publishers

So what can we do? We can offer alternatives to the app developers and publishers. We need good, excellent, alternatives actually. We need alternatives that offer them some benefits that go beyond the satisfaction to break free from Google because we have to face it: the majority just follow the trend and think that everything is normal.

One option that we have started to push is the support for PWAs. There is a trend for progressive web apps. They can potentially unify app development for all platforms, and it would be a good way to escape the Android SDK and any other proprietary dev SDK.

However, we would also need to have an independent push notification infrastructure. The reason is that if you take the web apps today, there is a common spec for the push API (https://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/) but you have an implementation for Chrome that is using Google FCM, one for Safari by Apple which is using APN, and one for Firefox which is using Mozilla Push Service. Not counting on Huawei which is introducing the HMS for push notifications.

So there is a road and some light, but it’s going to take some time, and meanwhile we will have to live in an hybrid world.

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