I’ve recently found out about Murena and e/OS and bought an old phone with e/OS already flashed on it to have a bit of play and see whether I’d like it.
I do , but it has raised a coupe of questions….I’m not very technically minded
The phone is running 3.1.4-a15 community-enchilada version. It has the 3.2 update available.
If I update will the phone work as normal after o rwill i have to do some technical side install thing?
and secondly, I have signed up for a Murena account intending to utilise it. However, on the security page it states it’s not encrypted.
Does this mean all the emails,files,photos etc I would store there are not encrytped at all? Even google offers basic encryption.
Any advice ,please,please put in your best non techie speak.Thanks
If I update will the phone work as normal after o rwill i have to do some technical side install thing?
updates in the same Android version (a15) are just that, regular updates you can do without disruption. For going to the next higher major version (a16) in a few months or a year, Murena usually waits with enabling those until they did some testing. It should go without disruption too then. Sideloading is a method to circumvent that wait and upgrade sooner.
However, on the security page it states it’s not encrypted.
With encryption only one thing matters: who has the keys. And if you don’t have them, any encryption matters in other ways (at rest, in transport), but not for a warrant. What you see in the webinterface on murena.io isn’t encrypted in a form that matters for a warrant.
murena introduced a sub-product called “murena vault”. Therein you really do have the keys on your side, but it isn’t that vault you sync the phone data to: emails, files, photos - that is outside the vault.
First things first: Welcome to /e/! It’s always nice when someone new joins in!
I just want to add that, since you are a on a community build, a version update might be tricky. Community builds don’t get OTA upgrades from one Android version to the next higher. So, in the future, when A16 is released and the support for A15 eventually dropped, you will certainly have to deal with adb and/or fastboot to install the new version.
If a dirty upgrade (one where you basically install the higher version over the older one and can keep all you data, apps and settings) is possible, remains to be seen. An unlocked bootloader is definitely a prerequisite! Locking and unlocking the bootloader erases everything on your phone. To keep the bootloader unlocked poses a certain security risk, but, as far as I understand it, only in terms of a so called “evil maid attack”.
I don’t know how much expertise you have and just hope I’m not telling you things you already know .
Anyway, you can find a lots of guides for these procedures in this forum, as well as a very friendly and helpful community.
I’m upgrading always very early via sideloads, so my recollection is dim, but I do remember having had major upgrades in the dev / community channel via the OTA api eventually available.
Doing some requests against that api with an older incrementalVersion (often the build string) and looking at the response list (updates and upgrades available) seem to confirm this.
Basically yes. I myself ran into a dead end two times with my old FP3 on dev/community build and was lucky that a dirty upgrade was possible and could be done without data loss, due to a non-closed bootloader. Perhaps things have changed since than in general, perhaps upgrade options depend on the device and/or the amount and capacities of caretakers for the builds. I don’t really know. I just thought that this should be considered as a possible way things might develop.
To claim certainty was definitely a bit exaggerated .
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