I recently bought a Fairphone 3+ from Murena and have been happy with the experience so far. I really like the integration with the Murena cloud, which is the awkward part of other projects.
I’ve run LineageOS for a couple of years before now and moved to /e/OS because I didn’t know LOS was still pinging Google all the time with captive portal and SUPL (also DNS set to google by default ??).
So I’m a bit upset to find out that /e/OS contacts Google via microG as a default default. This was very unexpected. I would expect the default to be off since /e/OS is degoogled. LineageOS with microG has microG features off by default.
I really do understand the following:
/e/OS is designed for the non technical users. The default configuration intends to offer the best user experience to its users, especially with third party applications.
… and I don’t think the following proposal affects that, since users know they are are trying to get away from google.
Proposal:
There should be two modes available in setup:
Chilled - occasional sparse, anonymized info sent for a smoother experience
Hardcore - zero google, for more experienced users who don’t mind workarounds
And tell users on that page about System → Advanced → microG to adjust settings in the future.
the component where you’d add the question+decision step is with the “first time setup wizard” at e / os / android_packages_apps_SetupWizard · GitLab … I was curious how you’d add another sceen, a simple activity to copy from and flip some booleans is LocationSettingsActivity.java
you’ll need to educate on 3 settings: device registration, fcm, safetynet … maybe just start the microg settings screen if users have objections. Would probably leave it ON by default, but “that’s just my opinion”
I haven’t seen a backlog entry asking for this, so you could add one and make your case. The code itself is very simple - just the build environment is entry-level hostile.
Thanks, raising an issue would probably be the next step. It’s one of those things that’s easy to implement but deciding on exactly what info/options to expose the user to could be the tricky part, being mindful of respecting:
/e/OS is designed for the non technical users. The default configuration intends to offer the best user experience to its users, especially with third party applications.
