Roadmap for 2025

Read the roadmap for 2025. Gaël’s vision and details of what the team is working on and what to expect in the days to come.

You can also read it on Medium

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

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Are there also plans trying to ensure /e/ os compatibility with Google’s play integrity ? Because it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere, and for my part it’s an important expectation, concerning the smooth running of banking applications in particular ? :crossed_fingers:

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@Manoj I think your roadmap link needs adjustment…?

@Larnicone

I suppose Play Integrity is part of this :man_shrugging::man_shrugging:

I’d like to believe it. If only it were explicitly stated, there would be fewer questions.

Capture-decran-2025-04-25-a-15.14.00

I guess the new Murena devices are :

  • Volla Tablet
  • Teracube 2s (unreleased)
  • …???
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Search is hard to do well. DuckDuckGo have around 400 employees dedicated to delivering properly localised search. Qwant, Mojeek, Brave and Startpage are unusable for me (especially for news). It will be interesting to see how Murena gets on with this.

It’s a totally unrealistic expectation, because technically only Google can “ensure” compatibility to Google, and Murena aren’t Google, obviously, and thankfully.
Murena can do their best to get /e/OS as near as possible to compatibility, but Google can break this at any time on their side of things, and then efforts to get /e/OS as near as possible to compatibility start anew, with affected Apps hampered or broken in the meantime, for a random amount of time.
As these efforts, however noble and turning out quite well for a lot of Apps, can’t be called “ensuring”, ensuring can’t be promised :person_shrugging:.

If banking Apps (or any Google-dependent Apps for that matter, which are very many) are more important than a nice-to-have-if-it-works-for-a-while for you, then a degoogled Android OS is the wrong choice of OS for you.
Or you can drop the banking App use case, that’s also a possible path to less frustration in this regard.

I know that this isn’t quite what the Murena marketing department want to tell you, but marketing is what it is, and reality is what it is.

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Hi all!

I wonder why do we need a vault if we could have end-to-end encryption in all files :thinking:

I know that. Just Gäel himself spoke some time ago about their collaboration and support for the developer of the micro-g project and their joint efforts to work on the problem of safetynet. Just as Google was abandoning safetynet in favor of play integrity. As I’m not aware of any news on this subject, I just wanted to know if it was still on their list of topics to be dealt with. As for the rest, I don’t expect any miracles. I have a subscription to their cloud precisely because I’m in line with their project. I’d rather do without an application whenever possible than sell my soul to Google and company :slight_smile:

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The phone is already encrypted by default, but once you’ve unlocked your phone, you have access to all files. Then a second layer of encryption is needed if you want more security for specific files.

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I’m glad to see that no AI crap is mentioned in the roadmap!

For the rest, mostly turning on some Nextcloud features for the Murena Cloud, which I guess might be useful for some. Let’s see what /e/OS 3.0 brings!

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Most people have a banking app they need. It is probably the one type of app that people absolutely need rather than being a nice to have. Generally today you can’t use your online banking without an app to authenticate. They have to at least strive to make it work better even if it is ultimately under Google’s control. They can strive to do it technically or politically/ legally but to be a viable alternative Murena has to put an effort into that.

The Murena site says ‘compatible with all apps’, it doesn’t say ‘warning, might not work with your bank; so if you need your bank use Google’.

It seems like Murena does strive to be an alternative for the general population and not be a niche phone for techies; so I am sure they will be working on this.

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Speaking for myself banking via an app is the one thing I absolutely don’t need.

Sure, I appreciate to use some SMS to verify it is me. SMS is clearly traceable, but I believe reveals little else.

“compatible with all apps”

That would seem a bit strong – all — hmmm.

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I have to transfer money to my account for mechanic, plumber, college and school fees for the kids. I have mortgage interest certs to download, DIRT certificates etc. I need to add new payees, review my transactions to watch for fraud and make sure my budget is adhered to. None of this can happen without the banks authenticator app. SMS not really an option with most banks these days.

Luckily all the banking apps I need work so far.

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What i love in this section is that “all” is written in the title and “most apps” just underneath :joy:
Better read the small print !

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Same.

I have no problem accepting that people want to do banking or bank authenticating on their smartphones, but I have problems accepting that this somehow would be an inevitable necessity.

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There are probably a number of factors that decide this, but for many it is a necessity. In fact for me, this and the authenticator for work, calls and SMS are the only necessities because everything else could be done on a desktop (email, tax) or are discretionary (posting to this forum, watching a video). Many people are not in a position to take a couple of hours off work and queue every time they need to avail of a banking service.

Glad to have read the roadmap here!

A few thoughts came to mind for clarification, if I might ask…

  1. It’s seemed pretty clear that the MDM subsystems are a bit…controversial, amongst the userbase. Is there a plan to either provide multiple builds, or perhaps the ability to remove it as part of the OOBE?

  2. By some miracle, could the server-side MDM tools be integrated into the self-hosted server? Yes, I’d like to MDM my own device on my own server, but I also concede that it’s a LOT of work to implement, both for the /e/ team, and depending on exactly how much MDM control I could implement on my side - would I have to use a Murena phone to control everything, or is my unofficial-Ronnz-special Nothing Phone 2 able to be MDM’d? On the flip side, however, I submit that a cloud-only MDM is the antithesis of “my data is MY data”…I trust that smarter people than me are working on sorting the two of those out, but let the record show that there’s at least one person who cares about finding some way to allow users (or organizations) absolute control over their own hardware while also preventing other users (or organizations) from doing so nefariously =).

  3. I’ve become a pretty big fan of Kagi, a privacy-centric search engine that is a paid service - I pay a flat rate for search, and I get good results, ad-free and garbage-free. I e-mailed them some time ago, and they have a per-query price point for the use of their API. Now, I’m pretty sure it’d be prohibitively expensive for /e/ to offer Kagi service to all of the users for free, but perhaps it can be added to some of the higher tiers of Murena Workspace, or perhaps Kagi could allow paid subscribers to get API access for integration with Murena? I realize I’m just spitballing here…but the goals of both projects seem parallel and /e/ seems to consider an improvement in search a roadmap priority, I’m sure there’s an alliance to be made.

  4. The ‘Find My Device’ functionality…I’m curious how the team is going to square that circle. While it’s mostly acceptable to have a simple “send message to phone to make noise and display a message on the screen” means of finding a phone left at a movie theatre or wedged between couch cushions, but the functionality delivered by Google and Apple is a bit more comprehensive. If we’re reporting missing devices back to the Apple or Google databases and using Apple/Google phones nearby to find them, well…self-explanatory concern. Even if it only allows the phone to report its GPS coordinates, well, then that means that there’s a server in existence that can override my ‘fake location’ setting…another self-explanatory concern. I’m perfectly happy to be wrong here, but I would definitely appreciate some clarity on exactly what functions and limitations are likely to be implemented.

I’ve got a couple of other half-thoughts…but these were the ones I thought were the most pressing to share.

The letter from Gael is excellent and maybe you grumps ( you sound like a bunch of nattering women and i are one)
Should read it and brighten up.:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Same here, I do all my banking on PC with a web browser. I will -not- do that on my phone. I don’t do payments by phone either. I still use SMS for bank alerts and verification, but only through normal text and there’s no sensitive data there. If someday my bank no longer provides access that way I’ll be unhappy about it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

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