Well, herein lies the question I’m raising - you may be perfectly happy about leaving your location data running and available to any app that asks for it, but there’s at least a plurality of /e/OS users who don’t, otherwise the fake location functionality wouldn’t be part of the core functionality.
The concern I’m trying to raise here hinges on how Find My Phone will work, in practice. On an iPhone, it’s enabled by default whenever a phone is connected to iCloud. It allows Apple to enable Location Services even if the user disabled it. Now, this is perfectly understandable behavior, because the inherent nature of finding one’s phone means that one can’t change settings to allow ‘real location usage’ after the phone is lost, without a server saying so.
If you trust Google’s pinky-promise, no-repercussions-if-they-break-it ‘commitment’ to limit their ability to override user privacy settings to user requests or send a server-initiated command to a phone to lock the holder out of its contents or erase it…then, respectfully, might I ask why /e/OS is a better choice than the stock ROM of your phone, or one of the other ROMs that have Google Play Services integrated into it?
I’m not trying to dissuade you from running /e/OS for any reason you deem worthwhile, but I submit that it is /e/OS has built itself on a foundation that can be summed up by saying “you don’t have to take our word for it”. They deliver the source code for their ROMs, and allow users like me to host our own server, so we never have to run a line of code, client-side or server-side, that we can’t inspect. That is what makes /e/OS compelling for at least a plurality, if not the majority, of /e/OS users, and Find My Phone functionality is inherently a request for trust.
I’m not saying that a Find My Phone function shouldn’t be pursued or implemented…but what I am saying is that it’s a bit more complicated for /e/OS to implement it than Google. Google’s mantra is “you pay us in data”, and most people don’t care. /e/OS is intended for a crowd that does care, which means that the implementation needs to more closely look like, “we’re offering the possibility if you want it, but ‘no means no’, so if you don’t want it, it won’t work, and we mean it, so while you can retain your privacy at all costs, understand that those costs may well be ‘losing your phone because you can’t enable Find My Phone after you lose it’.” I’m perfectly fine with that answer, and by all means, I will be thrilled, sincerely and honestly, that Murena can give you the functionality you’d like to have.
The crux of my concern, however, is that the roadmap seemed a bit vague on the implementation, and it’s the sort of thing that has the propensity to be VERY concerning depending on the details of that implementation. To a slightly-lesser extent, my concerns about the roadmap reflect on the fact that my loyalty to /e/OS largely hinges on the self-hosted server solution they provide. I hate, hate, hate bringing it up so much, but there haven’t been any commits (let alone releases) on the Gitlab page for it…and while I would be jumping for joy if the MDM and Find My Phone functions were implemented in the self-hosted server release, but if I were a gambling man, my chips would be on the self-hosted server implementation being depreciated, rather than receiving these new functions.
I hope that helps better explain my position on this matter.
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I don’t mean that as a disparage, I routinely review whether I can make the move away to a dumbphone altogether.