So, I’ll throw my two cents into the mix, for whatever they’re worth. I was thinking of writing an e-mail to @GaelDuval directly, but I’ll put the essence of my thoughts on the matter here, in public, so others in the community can either agree or express their disagreement.
The reason why nearly all of us are here is because of a fundamental distrust of “big tech”, and as many, many articles have shown, there are justifications for it, with the trajectory of Apple, Google, and Microsoft all heading in the direction of further distrust. It’s how most of us settled on /e/OS for our phones, and for a very long time, /e/OS was - and still is - probably the best balance between privacy and usability.
…But for all of the AMAZING strides that /e/ has made with regards to that usability, there are still concessions that every /e/OS user makes in order to run it. For starters, we have to select phones based on what /e/OS will run on. Next, it can take some time to get /e/OS installed. Once running, there are apps that are difficult to get working on /e/OS - banking apps, notoriously, but even Cisco Duo barks. Even if these aren’t issues for a particular user, other things can be. Things like per-device camera functions are inconsistent. I’m sure that Galaxy Note/Ultra users have reduced stylus functionality than the stock ROM. The very issue that involved OpenAI integration is to close the gap between /e/OS by adding functionality that’s a decade old for iOS and stock Android, while being unavailable for /e/OS. Now, obviously, these elements are things that, by definition, either don’t affect /e/OS users, or are things that we’ve agreed are worth the tradeoff for the privacy /e/OS gives us.
What seems to be happening, however, is a string of decisions that are made, implemented in some capacity, are unannounced, and then show up in the forums as eagle-eyed users start asking questions that SHOULD have an answer like, “read Gael’s announcement from three months ago”…but don’t. Even if the response is perfectly understandable and justified, a proper announcement can be helpful to assist with implementation.
Consider, for example, the MDM client addition. Personally, I think there were multiple ways to avoid the blowback on that, from either making a “business” fork that is effectively a recompile of the existing branch, but with MDM, to making the MDM something that is added during the initial setup procedure if it’s intended for use, to having a dedicated removal tool APK that can delete the MDM if it is in an unactivated state, and those are just options off the top of my head. Most of these apply to VTT as well. At the very least, an automated removal script that can be run from a root adb shell could be provided.
Now, I can very much appreciate that
1.) the excellent dev and management teams deserve to be able to pay their rent,
2.) running the /e/Foundation on donations and phone sales alone is going to make that difficult to do consistently,
3.) offering a business solution opens up doors for expansion without having to excessively panhandle or paywall features to make that possible,
4.) the nature of “privacy” has a very different context in a business setting, than it does in a personal setting, and
5.) it’s a pretty big ask to have the team maintain two codebases.
I get it. I do. I appreciate that the reason we’re here is because the addition of VTT will reduce the number of concessions which /e/OS requires its users to make. That said, I do think that @Sebastian and @Gquirt are fundamentally being reasonable and justified in their response to a trajectory of feature additions which potentially involve privacy concessions. Better to /e/ than Google, granted, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to request that such features be better discussed with the community prior to implementation, and that they are made more optional than they are.
I raise this because it seems like the current state of affairs is as likely to make /e/OS the worst-of-both-worlds, as it is to make it the best-of-both-worlds. I don’t know how big the market is for a business phone/server vertical that isn’t already serviced by JAMF/Miradore/ClearPhone, but I am sure that chasing it will come at the expense of at least some of the existing community and donor list, leaving /e/OS to eventually be the OS of compromise that requires too many concessions for business users to be viable over JAMF, while having too many sources of concern for privacy-conscious individuals to run on personal phones.
I appreciate the description we ultimately received on the forums. I appreciate the additional discussion that has taken place. I am grateful for ALL of the work that has been performed by the dev team to keep moving /e/OS forward. I will, however, humbly-but-strongly request that the feedback that has come forward be taken into consideration: discussion of potentially-privacy-compromising functions with the community, prior to implementation, along with a means of removal, is the essence of what is being asked for. To me, these are not unreasonable requests, and they are in line with the core tenets of what /e/ stands for.
Thank you for considering it, one and all.