I would use my /e/ phone as my main phone IF

Using /e/OS Setup
21

To me, it’s just not simple enough to use and sort emails even if you get only 10 or 20 emails a day.

22

I am probably less technically inclined than the average /e/ user. I also think that iPhone 6S is vastly superior in terms of hardware to the Samsung S7.

23

Also:

  • coming from standard Android, iOS feels both more polished and relatively safe to me;

  • Safari is better than Bromite, even though the version of Bromite on /e/ is not bad at all;

  • I really dislike /e/'s App Store, and never really understood where the apks come from.

24

All this said — and much of it is about personal preferences — /e/ is good, they should be praised for their work and I am keeping an eye on the project. But am I eager to move back to /e/ right away? No. I have other things to do and other priorities.

25

Yesss, everyone has to stick to one’s priority. We may not fight in all battles. I.e. I still use Windows and local Outlook :slightly_smiling_face: I am happy with /e/ because one of my priority was to avoid Apppple ang G00gle.
Using iPhone 6S will probably be a good choice.

26

nothing is holding me back! I’ve been using /e/ to great satisfaction on my main work and personal phone for more than a year now. All the minor things that still need to be fixed are really minor imo, uninstalling apps etc would be nice, but I am happy to just ignore them for now:)

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27

@Rik same I love /e/ as my daily driver

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28

Same here, I’m a happy user of /e/ and self-hosted Cloud :slight_smile:

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30

During about 5 years (2010-2015), i used a carrier gift new Nokia e5 (SymbianOS, physical azerty keyboard) witch I was used to threwed against the ground to prove its robustness to iPhone users.

During about 2 years, (2015-2017) i was proud to use a new ZTE Open-C with FirefoxOS.

since the last 3 years, i am very happy using a second-hand iPhone 5s

Since about 1 year, i’m very exciting playing with /e/OS and my firsts second-hand android devices, but i have change my s4mini’s battery for a larger capacity one and i don’t know yet configuring it, the system don’t know how to use it and shut-down after about 1 hour.

so i still use my « easy to use without knowledge » iPhone5s

31

ooh goolag scary. don’t get stuck there very high security

32

I am using my /e/ phone (Moto G) as my main phone.

Except the New Zealand government covid tracking app does not work on it when sideloaded, so I have a spare phone (Huawei Y560) with LineageOS for that. I also use it to get one or two apps from play store, then use F-droid ‘Nearby’ to copy them over to my /e/ phone.

There are no new /e/ updates for the Moto G, so I’m wondering how long I can keep going with it.

For those people talking about using google maps for navigation, OsmAnd works very well (at least in my part of the world). Because it has its own vector maps, it works offline. Great for saving data, or when you’re beyond mobile data range hiking etc.

33

Yes, OsmAnd is great. But it doesn’t have live traffic, which, if you have to traverse Los Angeles is really, really, really useful. Also, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t find businesses by name (at least around here), so you have to look up the address and copy-paste that into OsmAnd. I don’t hate Google (or I wouldn’t be using Android, I guess) I just want to minimize what I “pay” for their services and more importantly know when I’m “paying”.

34

Yes, OsmAnd is GREAT but sometimes you need nice traffic data and there aren’t too many sources. One lateral move is Waze - YES, it’s still Google but it doesn’t rely on any Play services or anything. Of course it still needs internet connection and will leak your position/route (but this being more or less true for any online service that gives you traffic info, except for the very primitive one-way broadcast ones like TMC). Having it in Shelter or running under another user so it’s frozen most of the time is the best you can do here and pretty straightforward. Sadly Android 10 isn’t on many /e/ devices but when that comes (or if you can use it already) it’ll really be great, as it won’t let any identifiers leak to apps (like MACs, IMEI, etc.). They’ll get your external IP; one could use a VPN if needed (it’ll help with literally any other site too) but usually that isn’t much of a concern; especially on mobiles if you’re doing IPv4 you’ll be behind a carrier NAT.

This is probably the best that can be achieved here, only the ones tracking their users heavily (and if they have many users) will have good traffic data.

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35

For email: I’m not a heavy smart phone user, but I shut off everything Google in my phone possible. I lean to my desktops for the heavy use. I installed and use ProtonMail in Oreo, and it works very nicely for occasional mail, and has the option to encrypt what you send. 5 MB for free, or paid if you want more space.

36

Thanks for pointing this out, I was not aware of the difference.

37

I would use /e/ phone as my main device IF I knew roughly when the stable version 1.0 truly for “mom and dad” would be available so I could then eventually decide among /e/, the forthcoming Librem phone, and the Pinephone.

Right now I feel that with /e/ seemingly stuck in beta I don’t want to commit to /e/ yet, maybe the Librem phone or Pine phone will turn out to be better options. And those projects appear to be moving faster.

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38

I don’t want to bash some VERY needed and nice projects but you’ll have to wait a lot for Librem or Pinephone to be usable, it was a milestone to make calls, they’re struggling to get the camera working or to make the battery last more than some hours (while doing nothing with the phone). This are things for developers and not really usable even by them.

In contrast /e/ functionality wise is just a LineageOS Android phone, it just works. Some banking apps or this or that might complain, some hardware works better or worse but otherwise is just fully usable.

39

I concur completely. I have had very few problems with /e/ on my redmi note 5 pro whyred. Any problems I have had were due to my flash-happy nature. I am learning the grass is not greener in the world of custom ROMs and that /e/ is more than sufficient as a daily driver.

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40

Which device is this ?

42

Hello,

I use /e/ as main phone since version 0.1
Without /e/ I would still use my Samsung E1200…
Of course, coming from this type of phone, I probably have less requirements than some, but /e/ opened me to the world of smartphones.

I only had two embarrassing experiences since then.
The first one when Bliss started crashing in a loop. It was blocking, but fortunately the fix came out very quickly, congratulations to the team.
The second one when I upgraded to version 0.5 where I lost access to my contacts (baikal server in selfhosting) and my sms history (fortunately there is the backup of Signal).
Note that I keep Signal which came by default at the beginning.

For me, the only brake to switch to /e/ could be the device.
Of course I would like to test a new Poco X3 or the latest OnePlus but not all devices can be integrated with a snap of the fingers…
So I personally buy a phone according to the list of supported devices.

I haven’t encountered any particular problems with Shelter. But I haven’t uninstalled it either.

I also provided a /e/ phone to my son for his first phone, hoping that he takes the right reflexes about his personal data.

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