All in all, /e/ improved their ROM since our first test about 9 months ago. There is still network traffic to Google, however, this has been definitely reduced to a minimum. Unfortunately, /e/ never replied to any of our direct messages via e-mail or Mastodon during testing, and they never tried to contact us. Due to this, there was no coordinated issue handling possible. Even more concerning is the mysterious Apps store, preinstalled on /e/ devices, and the reaction of the /e/ support when somebody asks about cleanapk.com.
Compared with our second report, network traffic to Google servers seems to be reduced to the web browser of /e/. The cleartext traffic of Magic Earth disappeared. The Weather app still leaks all traffic, including device information.
The Android security patch level is November 5, 2019, according to the settings. As mentioned above, Google dropped support for this ROM and didn’t release any security updates for Android 7 in November 2019. We don’t know why the patch level is November in this case. It should be October 2019. The current patch level is December 2019.
