Review after a month using an /e/ refurbished smartphone (S9)

/e/OS Devices /e/OS SmartPhones
,
1

Hello everyone,
I bought an /e/ smartphone and started using it as my main smartphone five or six weeks ago.
What do I think ?

Order :
Ordering the phone was easy. The website is clear and intuitive.
Just one thing was unclear : is the phone waterproof even if it is refurbished ?
The delivery was catastrophic ! The packet made three times the tour of Europe before UPS decided to send me that by post. Fortunately, I didn’t have to pay the shipping costs.

Hardware :
Nothing to say. The phone is like a new phone.

Software :
There are some (little) problems with the /e/ OS, but in general all is functioning fine.

Problems :

  1. The applications installed with apps aren’t up to date. If I open “apps”, then it says to me that there aren’t any updates, but if I open F-Droid, there are 10 or 12 updates displayed (only applications that I installed from “apps”). Can I update these applications with F-Droid instead of “apps” ?
  2. The NFC isn’t working. That’s very problematic for me. More information here.
  3. Auto rotation isn’t working fine. More information here.
  4. The preinstalled mail app crashes when I try to launch it. That’s not really a problem for me as I use K9 mail.
  5. This version of /e/ is based on Android 8 (Android 9 would be great).

I report those problem so they can be solved in a future update (as soon as possible, I’m waiting :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:), but this OS is already very good any very stable (I rebooted only two times in six weeks and nothing was unstable). Thanks to the /e/ team and good luck for the future of the project :+1::smiley:

2 Likes
2

Strange… Apps is checking on the f-droid repo as far as I know…

3

Hi @quadcopterman, thanks for the feedback and also raising the issue separately. There should be an update of the stable build - build on refurbished phones by end of this month.
The version being 8 and not 9 (pie) will also be addressed. We are working at a plan for upgrading devices to next OS version across the board. Will announce devices being upgraded soon.

4

Thanks ! That’s cool ! I hope that those issues will be fixed in this update (particularly points 2 and 3).

For the problem 1, can I update my apps with F-Droid, even if I installed them with apps ?

5

Yes, you can, but if Apps thought the last version is 2.0 (for example) and F-Droid thought it’s 2.1, I don’t know how Apps will react if there’s a more recent version installed than noticed on his repo.

As the best of my knowing, Aptoide is reverting apps to an older version in this case, idk if Apps will do the same thing.

I believe I know what is causing this problem, F-Droid builds the application itself while Apps will look for it already builded on another repository, for example the Google Play Store, build numbers are different (On Google Play, the builder is the developer who set a build number while on F-Droid the builder is an automated server who set another build number.)