First Impressions

Community Forum
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I bought a FairPhone 6 and put /e/ on it. I very much want to support European products and services.

I currently have a Pixel 7a with GrapheneOS. I like the GrapheneOS interface. I’m not a GrapheneOS zealot.

I was excited to boot my new FairPhone 6 with /e/. Unfortunately that quickly wore off when I tried to customize my phone. In my case this means, removing or disabling app I don’t want, and in general creating a minimalist look and feel.

My background had to be a picture. So my first picture using the FairPhone was of my hand pressed against the camera in a dark room so I could get a black background… aka a solid color.

It seems the UX team of /e/ was inspired by vintage iPhone icons/interface, not my style, but I can live with that. More annoying though is that I’m basically forced to move all these apps out of the way to a second screen to clean up my ‘home screen’ rather than placing apps onto my home screen.

Then there is this weird side-screen with random stuff on it… which I also can’t get rid of.

I had assumed with the whole ‘your choice’ mantra that I could at least choose which apps to disable, and preferably delete, but unfortunately this is not the case. The ‘Tasks’ and ‘Notes’ apps are apparently considered essential enough to force it upon me… I never use note-apps anything, and I don’t even know what function a ‘Tasks’ app is supposed to fulfill… it doesn’t seem like an automation app. I can’t choose my default browser to be installed, but I can also not remove the default browser provided. So, I effectively have to have 2 browsers installed; One that I use, and one I can’t get rid of.

When among the first things I feel the need to search for is: ‘How to remove or disable default apps on murena /e/’ I don’t feel I have that much choice, I feel more like I have a Samsung OneUI device in terms of app-freedom.

And in that regard they seem similar, I’ll have to plug my phone into ADB to rig the living daylight out of it to actually have less ‘bloat’ on it, and make it my own.

I can do all this, but what I wanted is to be happy when I booted up my phone, and have a solid experience where I feel like I’m in control of my phone.

What I did not want was the feeling of disappointment after buying a new phone.

What I did not want was the following thoughts:

  • ‘Can I return/ refund this phone?’
  • ‘If not, do I try to sell it second hand, or replash AOSP back onto it (which I don’t want because Google)?’
  • ‘And if not, how do I explain to my partner that it is basically a really expensive let-down?’
  • ‘Shall I just keep using my Pixel 7a with GrapheneOS, because it seems much more customizable?’

And I had already considered and accepted that:

  • Security updates come slower on /e/
  • Maybe banking apps might not work on /e/

As it is right now, I can’t recommend /e/ to others, sorry.

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Hello @Peoples, Welcome to the /e/ users forum.

simply add the Launcher by any of your choice and make it the default one, you will feel much more happy with your respectfull and easily repairable by yourself smartphone.

many users who don’t like Bliss (The simple /e/ default launcher), choose Lawnchair (The latest Pixel Launcher features shipped by Google) or Nova (The premier custom launcher for Android, loved by over 50 million)

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Hello @piero ,

Thank you for your kind and helpful response. Lawnchair might indeed be more what I’m looking for. I’ll try it out, and give a response about this later.

I’ll also try out /e/ some more and write here what I do like at a later time, as well as suggestions for improvements.

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I promised a follow-up with thoughts.

As Piero suggested I installed ‘Lawnchair’ as launcher. For me this improved things significantly (Lawnchair is a fork of Google’s Pixel launcher but with more customization options).

Doing so also made me realize why some apps are ‘locked’ from uninstalling. In /e/os’s launcher all apps are on the home screen. After a long press all the icons (the apps) jiggle and they have a minus symbol. When you press the minus symbol, it’s not the icon that gets removed but the whole app, without warning before uninstall.

Sorry, I can’t say this nicer, but that’s bad interaction design (nowadays UX). Android users expect to remove an icon from the homescreen, and be able to find it in a ‘drawer’ (or whatever name it’s given). Not to delete apps directly. It breaks expectations quite hard.
Please give people a choice, the freedom, to remove apps from a home screen, to hide them from first view. (EDIT: Correction, the following sentence was incorrect: “Also give a warning before an app is actually deleted. If someone were to accidentally do this to an Authenticator-app filled with MFA codes…”)

Anyhow, I do not have this issue now… still stuck with the uninstallable apps, but I’ll use ADB Control to scrub those.

I really like the Advanced Privacy feature. It gives a nice overview of trackers that are blocked! Thank you for that! Slight error in expectations, I expected to press on Advanced Privacy ‘card’ to be brought to the Advanced Privacy menu, or some overview, but it does nothing.

I’m not sure how many phones besides Fairphone have this “hardware” slider for disabling camera and microphone, but when I start a camera app, it just asks if I want to unblock the camera, and I can press ‘unblock’. For security it should at the very least require the pincode/password/fingerprint, otherwise it just gives a false sense of security. BUT, I think Fairphone should work with you to help remediate this as it is their phone and slider, or they should make a phone with actual hardware level blocking sliders.

/e/os, is not quite unique in it’s deGoogling of the OS, but it’s good that they do. If Murena has the ambition to move even further away from Google, aka leave Android altogether, Liberux (https://liberux.net/) is a Spanish project to make a Linux (Debian) phone, and they need all the support they can get I think. European companies ought to support each other I think, to create viable and popular alternatives to foreign products, especially with Google making it harder all the time to create and update AOSP/ forks/ custom roms etc. And people ought to support European companies like Murena (/e/os) and Fairphone… even if they complain :wink:

Suggestions for /e/

  • give an option to hide apps from direct view/ home screen
  • Ask for confirmation when deleting apps
  • Make Advanced Privacy accessible from the top icon/ card
  • Give an option to uninstall, or at the very least disable, apps with a warning if there is no replacement (phone for example).
  • Give users a choice of preferred browser, and provide them with safe options (duck duck go, Tor, Firefox, Ironfox, Brave, etc, and less private… it’s their choice). I don’t think we need a non-descript browser.
  • Provide an option to remove the /e/ info screen on the left, or to fully customize it.
  • As Micro-G is the default, can we move it into the ‘Settings’ menu, and remove the icon? It is, after all, now a setting-thing. It’s not an app we access to actively use it.
  • All App permissions ought to be adjustable, even on ‘core’ apps. People who want to fiddle with this are actively checking it out, it’s not an accidental action that can easily be performed.

Some of these suggestions should be quite easy, like adjusting core-apps/ uninstall/ disable options. Browser choice options would require more effort, similarly to inserting Micro-G into the Settings menu and removing the apps-icons. Obviously changing the launcher will require effort.

My criticism is not because I wish to be negative, but rather that I really want you (Murena) to be successful. I know how to tinker with Android, but most people don’t or don’t wish to put in the effort. If their first experience is something vaguely similar to mine initially, that’s ‘bad press’.

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My first experience was terrible as well to the point that I had it boxed up and postage paid to send it back.

A combination of poor service at the post office and big tech and Donald Trump conspiring to p*ss me off again caused me to reconsider after having it left sitting in the box for 2 weeks.

There were a few things that bothered me at the time but it started on the very first screen I saw. When I start most good Android phones for the first time I can pick English and then choose my country immediately. Murena instead picked a selection of locales they felt were more important than others such as British, US and Indian and left out all the others. I found later you could tweak that in the settings once you are setup.

Google caring about user experience, accessibility and localisation is what allowed them to become dominant in the first place and they will remain so until there are equally good alternatives.

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Indeed. I understand, as you may have read in my first message.

That’s also why I felt it important to both write about my experience, as well as provide constructive feedback. I really want European products and services to become better than their currently dominant alternatives.

This is also why I’m closely following a project like Liberux. When the Liberux Nexx phone launches, I intend to buy it. Not necessarily as replacement… because I hope by then /e/os will have improved significantly, although it might be even cooler if they can find some way to help each other out, and we can ditch Android altogether.

For now, I will stick with /e/os out of principle to ditch BigTech, and support EU products and services. But I completely agree that there is a lot of room for improvement.

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They get a “Confirm” dialogue

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My apologies, I apparently remembered incorrectly. I have edited the message where I said this stating it was incorrect.

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I usually get a prompt, asking for confirmation (pixel4a)

Swipe right and easily enter from the AP-widget.

Where’s that icon? Home screen? I have microG only in device settings - system…

Expectations regarding UI are akways tricky, they depend on what you are used to …but then tend to be generalized…