My thoughts after a year with /e/

Community Forum
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I jumped ship from iPhone last year to /e/ and overall, /e/ has greatly exceeded my expectations. The devs have done an outstanding job creating a product that is reliable and compatible in a highly complex environment. Thanks to all for your efforts.

The phone is flexible and easy to use and this can hardly be overstated. In just one example, being able to automatically sync photos etc. to my personal nextcloud server is awesome and works faster than iCloud ever did, plus my data is not on some corporate server in who-knows-where being scanned by who-knows-who. I still use a mac desktop and using a folder action script my pics automatically transfer into the OSX photos app in near-real time. Fantastic. The freedom and advantages of an Android-based phone over iOS are so compelling that I have been scratching my head thinking “why didn’t I do this years ago?”

There are a few capabilities though that I have come to miss and which hopefully will be on the /e/ roadmap some day.

  1. Ability to share high-quality video clips via messages. Understandably in the iPhone world these are shared via Apple’s servers not MMS so the limitations are carrier-imposed. It would be great to be able to do it somehow.

  2. Voice to text aka Siri. I miss the ability to compose messages by speaking into the phone rather than using the keyboard, especially handy when wearing gloves etc. Ideally this could be done with the phone’s processor and not processed in the cloud (privacy and all).

  3. More options in the US market. I bought a new international S9 (SM-G960F) which is a great phone, but it is an older model now. Setting it up was tricky and when I finally got TWRP installed I felt more lucky than skillful lol. Also, the international phone sometimes does not connect to ATT (my GSM provider) as consistently as the iPhone which I suspect relates to differing RF band coverage. So hopefully in the future /e/ can support more current US-compatible phones (and tablets).

Thank you again for your dedicated & excellent work.

-Russell

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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Thanks for your support and thoughtful comments @Russ . Appreciate the inputs and yes we do have these areas to improve upon.

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Good to see that this wasn’t just me on TMobile’s network. Could this be minimized by getting VoLTE actually working?

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I’ve had some recurring issues as well - at first I thought it was mostly due to the area I reside (semi rural, mountains). Is there something specific to /e/ that VoLTE is not working, or the S9, or is it a T-Mobile in the US issue?

In response to the OP’s post, I agree that it would be great to have more device options for the US market - probably a tall order, but one can hope.

My only issues after a good 5-6 months using /e/ as a daily driver are the calendar app’s over-active notification bug (not sure if that’s been fixed yet, maybe coming in 0.17?) and the EXTREMELY slow (almost non-existant) sync of photos via the ecloud system.

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Hopefully this is credible. Though this user doesn’t seem to have any network issues.

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You will be pleased to read this post (look at the end)

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