New player on the privacy market: Simple Phone

As an avid user of Simple Mobile Tools I was happy to see today’s announcement by their creators about the launch of Simple Phone. Interestingly, same hardware choice as Murena One (Coolpad Cool S or some variation of it, apparently) and a couple of other projects that claim to be privacy-centred (Project Phoenix, BlackPhone, Endoacustica, Rob Braxman). Not for me for specs reasons, but after reading a bit about Coolpad, I’d be having second thoughts about choosing it as a privacy-focused device. Thoughts?

5 Likes

It’s all about defaults. I thought it be great to bundle the Simple Apps in a ROM - with Hardware, even better

Lunar Open Mobile Platform – developed by The Good Phone Foundation

Some new names, but in general momentum in community Android I welcome personally

3 Likes

@tcecyk
Not new names at all… it appears to be SecureGroup, a company that has many names.

4 Likes

I guess it’s too easy to grab a $150 device, slap on a “privacy” tag and bump the price to $400…

3 Likes

This was the Apple successfull method…

.

Edit : but they had exclusivity on the device…

3 Likes

Definitely nice to see momentum on the privacy oriented devices. I’ve used some of the simple mobile tools and they’re nice, fast and bloatware free. Will definitely keep an eye on this and wish them huge success :metal:

4 Likes

Some few reddit topic (here and here) about this phone. Interesting to read it. It seems that they are not totally transparent on all the topics discussed:

Going to this page, I feel like Google learned more about me than I learned about the OS:

SimpleOS is a streamlined mobile operating system based on the Lunar Open Mobile Platform

What is the LOMP? I can’t find any information about it online.

…developed by The Good Phone Foundation

Who are these people? Their website is an empty landing page.

Ditto regarding the phone itself (Coolpad cool S??) as for the murena one? We still don’t have a clear answer on this subject. :thinking:

I laughed: :joy:

2 Likes

As someone who got bait-and-switched with Wileyfox and wrestled with a Pinephone for 18 months I’m all for it, because I’d rather pay people like these for the software and support through buying a handset, than have nothing at all.

A blog post from the SMT dev with some back story: https:DOUBLESLASHwww.simplemobiletools.comSLASHblogSLASHwhy-simple-phone

It sounds very good, and I know that the Simple Mobile Tools apps are good (though they don’t meet my needs, as I like my Calendar and Contacts apps to have internet access, because sync!)

As regards the phone and the OS, there is still too little virtually no information. Particularly a lack of information on “The (still very anonymous) Good Phone Foundation” and “their own Android-based mobile OS”. Will the OS be Open Source? Who owns the foundation?

Until that becomes a lot clearer, I won’t be going anywhere near Simple Phone

This topic was automatically closed after 15 days. New replies are no longer allowed.