First impressions on Fairphone 2

/e/OS Foundation & Community /e/OS experience
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Hello everyone,

I just installed /e/OS on my Fairphone 2 this weekend.

First impressions

  • Installation was very straightforward. I had been using LineageOS previously so I already had TWRP.
  • Kudos to the development team for solving the problems that required OpenGApps, like Location Services and the Play Store. It’s amazing and delightful to be able to install my phone without these, thank you!
  • Almost all of the apps I needed were in the /e/ App store. I love the value-added feature of having a privacy rating for each app. Also really good to have apps from F-Droid and Play Store in one place. Installing the apps was a snap.
  • A couple of apps were not in the /e/ store, but thanks to Aurora I was able to install those as well: two banking apps and the Oxford-Hachette French dictionary app (paid-for version, to disable ads and allow offline use). I subsequently requested the banking apps through the App store so hopefully they will be there soon.

I am really happy with my new phone OS, it feels like a significant upgrade. Thanks again guys, I will make a contribution to the project.

Issues

I did have a couple of minor issues:

Bliss Launcher seemed buggy. Each time I swiped away from the home page and swiped back, the space for the widgets got smaller (bottom widgets were cropped). Eventually they would disappear from the screen entirely. A reboot reset them to full-screen but then the same thing happened again. Also the weather widget did not work. I put in my API key and it said it would verify it at the next weather update, which never happened.

In the end I decided I didn’t really like Bliss anyway. I was used to Trebuchet from LineageOS and I found the Bliss screens too cluttered with apps I don’t really need. After scanning this forum I decided to replace it with KISS which is rapidly growing on me.

Centr app is in the /e/ store but so far I was unable to get it to work. The app starts but when I type my login credentials it gives its famous “Oops, we dropped a dumbbell” message. It would be nice to get this working but it’s no deal-breaker as all of the content is available through the website.

Question

  • Is there a way to list all installed apps which were not installed through the app store? It’s possible to go through the list in settings one-by-one and see if the app was installed by Apps or Aurora but it would be better to get a list by installer. Use case: if an app installed with Aurora becomes available in Apps it would be better to reinstall the app from Apps to get updates. Even nicer if you could be automatically notified when an already-installed app becomes available in the App store.

I think that’s about it for now!

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Answering my own question: it is possible to get a list of apps over USB debug. This more or less does what I want:

$ adb shell pm list packages -i|grep installer=com.aurora.store

I put up a separate post with details of the problem with the Centr app.

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Have fun with your Murena phone. :slight_smile: I like mine very much.

Use case: if an app installed with Aurora becomes available in Apps it would be better to reinstall the app from Apps to get updates. Even nicer if you could be automatically notified when an already-installed app becomes available in the App store.

That is the wrong direction. Aurora downloads directly from Google, Apps downloads from cleankapk.org, which “very likely” also downloads directly from Google. In the end, you will get the updates faster in Aurora.

Edit: Have a look at LukeLauncher:

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Hi Fairphoner,

Thanks for the comments!

I think it’s only a Murena phone if /e/ was pre-installed, right? Mine is a FP2 which I installed with the TWRP method. But anyway, thank you, yes I am enjoying it!

Then why use the /e/ App store at all?

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Hahaha…that’s a good question.
I don’t know…i think days and weeks now, but i have no idea.
There is f-droid and aurora…

Maybe the answer is 42 :wink:

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You get warnings of trackers contained in the app, a privacy rating and access to a Exodus report on privacy.

There is negative feeling that the apps might have been altered, maybe they have been stripped of some background google bits, but these things are not fully disclosed.

If you want a well degoogled phone you must take some precautions, if you believe in the /e/ ecosystem it requires a leap of faith, whatever tricks one employs, perhaps?

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